Get £500 For Pain Caused By Your Bank

I had a bank charge case with the FOS in 2004
They ruled against me, because it was to complicated. Yes in some cases as has been shown they are the consumers friend, but they are funded by the banks. Taking a bank to court ? If not in the small claims court you could face thousands in costs. The FOSneeds to be more transparent.

This year i had to close my debit account because the bank appeared to be taking amounts of £20 from my balance at intervals, saying misty things such as "you went overbalance a few months ago so we're taking it now", even though i'd sorted that out months ago. I don't know if i'm really able to report that kind of thing though.

Should we infer that when the "FOS agreed with the customer" percentage plus the "Mixed outcome" percentage is subtracted from 100 the resulting number is the percentage of complaints where the FOS agreed, presumably completely, with the business (Bank, insurer, financial institution)? If so, all but the top 3 lines are revealing!

The FOS cannot force the bank to pay up. It is purely a gesture of goodwill. My travel insurance company failed to pay up in my opinion, what is a serious and valid claim.(i broke my back with permenent results). Lawyer recomended FOS can take up to 9 months simply to issue its recommendation. Funnily enough the insurance company said i should complain to the FOS. Instead i'm taking them to the courts. there is nothing worse than a toothless dog that negiotiates a mere £500 compensation when e.g you've been misold a mortage and its costed you £1000's in interest, fee's, lawyers and inconvience. take them straight to court and let the judge decide.

So my name would be Mr. Snott Pizza Chunks. I like it :-)

Hi Dhahran2001

Yes, that is correct. If I had realised there would be any doubt about that then I would have spelled it out.

Are you suggesting that it's not worth complaining if you have just, say, a 35% chance of victory? Even though the FOS is free?

Neil (the author)

Good stuff as ever, Neil. Thankyou.

In the last couple of years, I have had one claim resolved via the FOS, another via the Pensions Advisory Service plus a successful claim for illegal bank charges that the bank in question settled in full just before the case came to court. I have another claim against a major high street bank with the FOS at the moment.

So my message to anyone with a legitimate moan is:
a. assemble all the evidence
b. download the FOS form
c. submit the claim and wait.

That said, the banks and insurance companies have done the arithmetic and it works like this. Out of every ten aggrieved customers, five probably won't even know they have been shafted, two will know but won't know what to do about it and another two will be too lazy or disillusioned to bother. That leaves one who will pursue the complaint to the bitter end. They will get what they should have had in the first place plus a small sum in compensation ordered by the Ombudsman. The aforementioned companies therefore have every financial incentive to continue as they have been doing.

The answer? Give the FOS some real teeth. For example, where the company has been blatantly in the wrong, make them pay up as now PLUS a swingeing fine to the FOS ... say between £1k for a first offence up to a maximum of say £250 per case if they have form. This would enable the FOS to reduce the annual levy on those companies that act with integrity and for those which don't it would hit them where it hurts and they would have to mend their ways. The FOS should also be empowered to publish a quarterly league table of good and bad companies, which would feature prominently in the press.

I'm convinced that these two simple measures would fundamentally change the ethos of the industry within a couple of years and would ultimately reduce the workload of the FOS.

Hi Neil,
For a long time I have understood what is meant by the expression "There's no such thing as a free lunch". One way or another people like you and me are paying for the FOS and seemingly 82% of people claiming about personal pensions are claiming for something they are not entitled to. The institutions will incur costs defending themselves against these claimants and all our personal pensions will be fractionally abated because of this wasted effort.
We all pay for compensation; do we all want to pay for compensation?

"....take the company to court staight away if you cannot reach agreement."

Remember that the company have far more money than you. They'll just threaten you with costs and that'll cool your enthusiasm for court. The FOS are a smoke screen. Seems to me that there are free lunches at the FOS,FSA...

"We all pay for compensation; do we all want to pay for compensation?"

So what will you do when you get shafted?

inscotland says quite correctly that people who can't manage their finances properly ought to suffer the consequences. Well, if this is so, why are the banks, who loaned money to those who could not repay them, now allowed by their own rules to deduct money from my account to recoup their losses e.g. Barclays charging £20 for their new "overdrawn allowance" scheme which you have to opt out of but which is not mentioned in their letter to you, only in a large booklet which you are supposed to wade through; or for any small enquiry that you make from the bank they can & do make charges even though they may have thousands of pounds of your money on which they pay only small amounts of interest by keeping on swapping accounts so that you, as someone who is usually very busy, don't have time to keep altering them. I have never been overdrawn in my life, although I have come pretty close to it. Obviously inscotland has been lucky like me. No, I don't think those who are unduly frivolous and go overdrawn for silly spending deserve our pity but many people have been made redundant through no fault of their own do (my late husband was one of them and the pressure of being made redundant twice in a relatively short space of time and the pressure put on him as he faced that redundancy - he knew of it 4 years in advance and had to work harder and harder as his department diminished from about 30 people to only himself and one other contributed to his death - he only lived 18 months after and the first company reduced his redundancy compensation for his loyalty - both times he was one of the last to go). Inscotland needs to learn that in life you don't always get what you deserve. A very short time after my late husband died I went to a bank and said that I had just been widowed and needed an investment that was a "medium to small risk" so that when I retired I would have something to help me with living. They quoted me returns of 12% provided I looked upon it as a fairly long term investment (5 to 10 years was quoted) - well, I've been with that bank 10 years plus and from the £7,000 I invested, the most I have ever seen it go up to was £7,200 but most of the time its just far less. Please take your blinkers off inscotland.