Financial Ombudsman Service consultation on Temporary changes to outcome reporting in our business-specific complaints data - Which? response

Summary:

• Which? welcomes the Financial Ombudsman Service’s (FOS) continued efforts to improve the service that it offers and to drive better outcomes for consumers.
• The FOS has considerably reduced its longstanding backlog of unallocated complaints, from around 90,000 to 37,000. The temporary scheme that the FOS offered firms to incentivise them to make proactive offers, by reporting outcomes separately, appears to have helped speed up this process for many consumers and still achieve fair outcomes.
• While we supported this temporary change to the reporting of outcomes to help address the longstanding backlog of complaints, the FOS has not sufficiently made the case for outcomes for new cases that are resolved within the first two weeks to be reported separately for firms. We want this proposal to be paused for further consideration alongside the FOS’ other wide-ranging proposals for funding reform.