Banking and mortgage complaints figures released

The Financial Ombudsman Service has released data on complaints received from individual financial businesses for the second half of 2009.  These are complaints made to the ombudsman between 1 July and 31 December 2009 which include mortgage complaints.

Within this six month period the ombudsman received 82,136 new complaints. This shows an increase of 18% compared to the first half of 2009 where 69,841 complaints were made. 88% of the new complaints are related to just 155 financial businesses, which is a worrying statistic when you consider the Financial Ombudsman Service covers over 100,000 businesses.

Lloyds TSB customers have the most to complain about.

As a group Lloyds TSB has the highest level of overall complaints at 23,853 which are around 29% of all new complaints.  As an individual business Lloyds TSB Bank Plc tops the list with 9952 complaints and Bank of Scotland plc (part of Lloyds TSB) comes third with 7349.  Sandwiched in the middle at the number two spot is Barclays Bank Plc with 9836.  After the top three the number of complaints drops back considerably with HSBC Bank plc leading the pack with 3048 complaints.

Mortgage complaints

The figures for the number of mortgage complaints and home finance are interesting.  Out of the main high street banks Bradford & Bingley (now part of Santander) had the highest number of mortgage complaints in proportion to the overall complaints against the company.  The ombudsman received 38 out of a total of 155.

The ombudsman previously provided these figures to the lenders privately but they unanimously decided to make the figures public.  This should help encourage the businesses to -

• benchmark their standards of complaints-handling against other firms;
• learn from businesses who are handling complaints better; and
• reduce the number of unresolved complaints referred to the ombudsman service.