The data published today on the ombudsman's website covers consumer complaints handled by the ombudsman service between 1 January and 30 June 2009. During this six-month period, the ombudsman service received a total of 69,841 new complaints – of which 87% related to 142 financial businesses (out of more than 100,000 businesses covered by the ombudsman).
The number of new complaints about each of these individual businesses ranged from 31 to 8,283. Five banking groups each had more than 3,000 complaints which together accounted for 38,286 cases – over half of all the new complaints received by the ombudsman during this six-month period.
Barclays had the most complaints at 8,283; followed by Lloyds TSB on 6,947; Bank of Scotland with 5,804; Abbey National came fourth with 2,493 complaints; and NatWest received 2,493 complaints.
The data published today shows that the ombudsman service upheld an average of 59% of complaints in favour of consumers. Across the 142 individual businesses included in the complaints data, this uphold rate varied substantially between 11% and 95%.
The ombudsman service upheld 61% of banking-related complaints, 41% of mortgage complaints, 70% of general-insurance complaints and 42% of investment-related complaints.
Chairman, Sir Christopher Kelly, said: “I will now be writing to the chairmen of the financial businesses that generate the largest proportion of our complaints workload, to ask them to consider very carefully both their own complaints performance – as reflected in the data we are publishing today – and the complaints performance of their competitors.”
Ombudsman Walter Merricks said: “We have already been providing comparative complaints data on a private basis to the larger financial businesses – but this has led to no improvement in the standard of complaints handling by the worse-performing businesses. I believe that putting this information into the open will now give those worse-performing businesses vital encouragement to improve – which should mean fewer of their customers having to bring unresolved complaints to the ombudsman.”
