Complaint data

Firms are required to report to the FSA every six months on the number of complaints they receive and how they handle them. The data covers the following two areas:

Volume of complaints received according to product and cause of the complaint. Firms report the volumes according to 36 product categories (e.g. pensions, endowments, general insurance ). These categories are combined into five different product groups (e.g. general insurance and pure protection, life and pensions, investments).
Complaints handling - including the number of complaints that take more than eight weeks for firms to resolve and the proportion of complaints upheld by firms.

The FSA definition of a complaint is...

"any oral or written expression of dissatisfaction, whether justified or not, from, or on behalf of, a person about the provision of, or failure to provide, a financial service which:

alleges that the complainant has suffered (or may suffer) financial loss, material distress or material inconvenience; and
relates to an activity of that respondent, or of any other respondent with whom that respondent has some connection in marketing or providing financial services or products, which comes under the jurisdiction of the Financial Ombudsman Service."

The FSA currently publish aggregate complaint data every six months - this gives an overview of the statistics for all firms which report to them. Half yearly data has already been published for the periods between 2006 to end June 2009, and will be updated with figures for July to Dec 2009 in April 2010. This can be found on the FSA website. By August 2010 the FSA require all firms that receive 500 or more complaints in a six month period publish information on how they have handled complaints.

In 2009 the FOS (Financial Ombudsman Service) also started to publish data in respect of financial businesses with at least 30 new cases and 30 closed cases during the six-month period. They provide information by firm on the number of their cases received and the percentage of cases where the decision had been changed in favour of the consumer. The most recent data can be found on the FOS website.