When Banks don't Act on FOS Findings

Cotta wrote: »

The problems since FOS made their original decision is almost like a new complaint and I am not sure how this can be classified as a moderate inconvenience when I have been locked out of my funds since April.

Perhaps they'll share their scale if you ask? I know that the whole experience has been draining, irritating, time-consuming, etc, but I presume that the higher end of the scale will refer to cases where, for example, someone actually loses out on a house purchase or the bank is demonstrably negligent rather than incompetent or intransigent? I didn't think they were actually saying it's 'moderate inconvenience' but that inconvenience is moderate relative to tangible financial (or data) losses.

Cotta wrote: »

FOS were clear today that my time on the case has no bearing on the compensation levels.

Have they clarified how they came to their figure? I can see why they'd have difficulty with accepting a simple claim along the lines of 'x hours times y hourly cost' but would have thought that there'd be some recognition of the inconvenience inflicted both by TSB and the adjudicator, even if not explicitly worked out as an isolated figure....

Cotta wrote: »

I was quite disappointed today when the FOS representative seemed to forget about the missing interest promised in tranche 1

I thought they were potentially conceding this though?

Cotta wrote: »

and the £500 had been agreed with TSB before I was consulted on it.

This seems consistent with the adjudicator's style, i.e. trying to broker an agreement between the parties rather than unilaterally issuing a decision. Ultimately you still have the right to reject it but the adjudicator is presumably saying there's no scope for further negotiation, so she'd appear to be playing the Theresa May role here!

Cotta wrote: »

I said I'd await her email to me which was due yesterday outing the final decision and to see if any reference will be made to the missing interest. I really don't want to be greedy but I do feel in principle that the second period was much that the first even though TSB feel I should have learnt to cope without the account.

In principle the whole thing never should have happened, and TSB's comment wasn't helpful, but at some point you have to take a view about what's on the table and ask yourself if you really think you're likely to be able to get any more out of the situation.

If I recall correctly from posts way back, you rightly mitigated your losses by opening an account elsewhere so you could carry on with your life without bailiffs at the door, etc - presumably TSB didn't know that but were FOS aware of it?

Cotta wrote: »

It was a request from FOS.

I suspect that their motivation for suggesting this was exactly as I posted above then, i.e. to mitigate your losses.

The FOS's guide to calculating compensation for distress and inconvenience includes:

has the consumer tried to minimise the impact of the problem?

When we’re thinking about how someone’s been affected by a business’s mistake, we’ll also look at how much they did to try and minimise the impact of what happened.

If we think someone could have lessened the impact in some way, we might say it’s fair to award slightly less compensation. But we always bear in mind that the consumer shouldn’t have had to deal with the business’s mistake in the first place.

So, if you used an alternative account for day-to-day purposes since August, it would seem from the above that FOS will see that as less TSB-related disruption than in the earlier period.

Granted there were a range of other issues throughout, but on the specific matter of not being able to access your money within TSB, I can see the argument that this was less of a problem once you'd established an alternative account, irritating though it undoubtedly will be to accept that TSB were right that you did find a way to cope without the account (it doesn't mean they were right to say it though!).

That's not to say that you can't make a case that the second period was much worse than the first, but I'd be wary of trying to overplay the lack of access point if FOS know that was less problematic than before.