FOS costs rise as waits lengthen

The FOS said it received a much larger volume of complaints about investment and pensions than it expected to in 2020/21.

The ombudsman received 20,854 complaints related to investments and pensions over the past year, almost double the 12,500 it expected.

It resolved 15,521 of these investment and pensions complaints with a 22% uphold rate. This uphold rate is lower than the 31% of total complaints upheld by the ombudsman over the period.

The FOS said the majority of complaints related to a providers’ administration or customer service. The ombudsman also noted that it continued to see a large number of SIPP complaints and upheld the majority of these.

For the year ending 31 March, the FOS upheld 31% of overall complaints. This figure rose to 40% with the exclusion of PPI claims.

In its annual report out this week, the ombudsman said the FCA has approved a compulsory jurisdiction levy of £96m and an increase in its case fee to £750 to help address the deficit the FOS has built up during the pandemic.

The free case allowance for individual firms will be maintained.

The ombudsman reported a slight drop in the percentage of cases resolved with an informal view. In 2020/21 87% of complaints submitted by consumers to the FOS were settled with an informal view, in comparison to 90% the year previous.

The ombudsman missed its case allocation targets by a long way. Only 50% of cases were allocated to a case handler within 28 days. The ombudsman targets 100% of cases to be allocated within this timeframe.

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Answers to complaints were also slower than expected. Only 36% of complaints received an answer within 28 days where the ombudsman targets a 50% response rate within this period.

The annual report showed that the number of resolved complaints more than 12 months old by 31 March remained steady at 90%, slightly below the 95% target published.

Consumer satisfaction with the ombudsman fell well below the 65% targeted. Just over half (54%) of consumers said the were satisfied with the FOS service in comparison to 6 in 10 (57%) the previous year.

FOS chairman Baroness Zahida Manzoor acknowledged the long wait times and missed targets and said the ombudsman has responded by restructuring the board and starting a review process with a view to changing the structure of the ombudsman in the future.

The ombudsman published 28,053 final decisions over the year, a slight rise from the 25,940 published in 2019/20.

Earlier this month the FOS proposed changes to its case reporting process to encourage firms to settle early and reduce waiting times.

The FOS proposed the temporary changes in a consultation paper saying that it wants more firms to settle complaints before they are investigated by the service.

To prevent firms from taking a hit to their reputation with high uphold rates, the FOS said it would create a separate category for recording complaints proactively settled by a firm before the FOS has issued an opinion.

These complaints would be recorded as having either a change in outcome or no change in outcome but would not contribute to a firm’s overall complaints uphold rate.

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