The first thing to say is that this is a long post for which I make no apologies. So much has happened and I need to express it not only so I can move on but so people understand exactly what has happened to this organisation that I was at one time, proud to work for.
The crux of the problem at the service comes from one simple issue. That is that knowledge and skill have somehow been downgraded so that they are now equal to ignorance (a lack of knowledge and skill). In an environment where those things are equal what tends to happen is that those with little or no knowledge and skill for the job of dealing with complaints (either at adjudicator or ombudsman level) tend to get promoted more often that those who do their jobs holding themselves and those around them to the highest standards. This problem is not unique to FOS but it is so much worse in an organisation that makes decisions that can affect peoples financial and even personal well being.
I am afraid that for a good couple of years, the hard work of adjudicators ombudsman and other staff has been ignored. This has truly turned into a deeply damaging place to be with many people being made to feel that nothing they do is good enough. Many at the FOS are chronically underpaid and in return their targets are increased. If they do not meet these often unrealistic goals, they are bullied out. The way people were measured has changed year on year along with the goalposts. This still persists to this day. The appraisal system is operated behind closed doors and there is no accountability either to staff or for the poor excuse they have for a union (which is little more than a mouth piece for the executive). Essentially people are marked up or down on a scale depending on how the managers in a department feel that day for often nonsensical and spurious reasons. This then influences what pay rise and/or bonus an individual receives. The percentages have been low for years, so much so that people can hop across to the FCA and go from the early £30,000's to somewhere near the early £40,000's. Bearing in mind that these are usually equivalent jobs and that the FOS has chosen to locate itself in Canary Wharf (as does the FCA).
There have lately been instances where staff have had to get together and go to an external union to protect what are basic employment rights that the executive thought they could trample over. Experienced people have left and are leaving. As with many people my reason for leaving was self preservation. The environment created by the Chief and Senior staff became so toxic that my physical and mental health began to suffer significantly. I am still recovering having left months ago for a job paying a lot less at which I am much happier. Not because it is easier, but because I am now in an environment where people are valued not only by their immediate manager but also the board who are all approachable and accessible.
I make no secret of the fact that I am bitter, but that does not mean that what I have to say is not worth anything. I am bitter because I gave this employer nearly a decade of my life, I worked really hard and I was committed to doing my bit to make the place a success and help build their reputation. A lot of people do this for their employer and are then made redundant. Not great but they get a pay off. My role as an adjudicator went, but there was no pay off for me because the FOS does not value its staff. There is no doubt that FOS needed to change, but the way this was managed has been brutal, unnecessary and dangerous.
It was not necessary at all to create new roles or to get rid of specialists. Having ombudsman run teams is actually a really good idea. Why? Because an experienced ombudsman running a team of specialist adjudicators is an incredibly effective way of making sure that the right outcome is quickly reached in the cases they deal with. All of the various areas (banking, PPI, Consumer Credit, Investments etc.) have their own complexities that only someone who works on those complaints all the time will know about. What has happened here is that senior people have taken a look at the easier stuff and decided that anyone can do it. You will always find easy cases in all areas, but a lot of the cases coming through the door require some level of specialism for the right outcome to be reached.
What we have now is teams of investigators dealing with all case types led by ombudsman managers who are in the same boat as their team. They will know cases they dealt with in their previous roles but that will be about it. The demographic of the people in those roles is mostly younger relatively inexperienced adjudicators/ombudsman or former support staff with no casework experience a brilliant general knowledge but little in depth knowledge. Most experienced ombudsman and adjudicator simply refused to apply for the new roles and not enough of this experience remains to mitigate the effects of this shift.
The result is a situation that can only damage the reputation of the service by making it more likely that decisions made by staff will be wrong. Not because they are bad at their job, but because they will be made to deal with cases outside of their knowledge.
When I was there we had links to the new investigation teams to support them in the background and there was a database put together to help them. However, trying to explain a complex issue to someone with no experience in your area is not easy. Also, the database fell victim to the different objectives of those working on it. Some wanted a tone friendly, snappy and formulaic tool whilst others were more focussed on making guidance notes that assumed no knowledge and guided the person through a particular type of case step by step. The result was a series of guidance notes that is mostly worthless if the objective was to help people deal with their cases. The project managers who were simply concerned with 'on-boarding' (what ever that is in plain English) were I suspect, the main beneficiaries of this piece of work.
What about training I hear you ask? Well, having viewed these training materials for myself and spoken to investigators who received it, I can say that it is generalised and wishy-washy. It is designed to make a person more likely to be good at displaying empathy and persuasiveness rather than reaching the right outcome. That is not to say empathy and persuasiveness are not qualities a good adjudicator/investigator should display but these must been informed by having the right knowledge for the cases being dealt with. This knowledge is I am afraid conspicuous by its absence within the new training materials. There were actually sets of training materials available from all or most areas put together by senior adjudicators and ombudsman for new starters and for those needing to refresh. Hours and Hours of good effective training designed by caseworkers to help other caseworkers. None of this was used. Instead it was condensed and summarised so much that its value was lost.
It is a virtual impossibility that someone dealing with all case types can build the required knowledge to address a lot of those cases. What is more likely to happen is that they will be good at the ones they see quite often and out of their depth on the rest. With a dwindling supply of support as experienced people leave and not enough experienced people within their own teams, I really do not see how this can work.
They have also closed the Consumer Contact Division. These were the people who answered the phone for new complaints and set them up to be passed to an adjudicator. They were very good at what they did and I cannot stress enough how valuable (and underpaid) they were as part of the service. Now, your call is answered by an Investigator who is also dealing with a caseload of complaints. So in other words, they have limited time for your call and limited time to look at complaints properly in terms of giving each case the time and consideration it deserves
The FOS will release trite statements in the press about how successful all of this has been and how satisfied consumers are with the service. They will also say that times are challenging as they change to meet the evolving needs of consumers and businesses. This is a selective view of the truth at best. There are some posts on here from investigators and ombudsman managers and there are some who I know who are stressed out of their minds. What is also true is that the FOS only uses the positive data. Why? Because having spent about £13m on getting PWC in to design this disaster in a time when they had an annual operating deficit of about £40m per annum – they need this to work.
The reality is that before PWC came in, we were already making small changes and getting complaints handled in weeks rather than months in a lot of areas. Our consumer and business satisfaction scores were getting very good because it had been realised (perhaps a little belatedly) that getting on the phone and talking to people, showing you are interested in their side of things was the right thing to do for for both businesses and consumers. So what I am saying is that a root and branch restructure was completely unnecessary for the FOS to move forward (rather like the one done in the NHS we are all familiar with). Some smaller and more strategic changes along with getting rid of non jobs for the clique and more accountable spending would have made the place much more effective both in terms of overheads and productivity.
Another issue was the case fee. A senior member of staff actually said that we could not justify charging more than the £550 case fee because of the climate with the public sector. Firstly, the FOS is very loosely an agency of the treasury. It is definitely not public sector in the same way as the NHS. Secondly, its case fees are paid by the banks and financial institutions with there being allowances for very small organisations. So what difference would it make to a big bank to pay slightly more per case? Very little other than slightly less profit I expect. However, the executive are frightened of the bigger banks and would rather preside over a situation where the bigger banks have under staffed complaints departments and take the cheaper route of using the FOS as an external complaints handling arm.
Whilst all financial business complaints stats are published on the FOS website, nothing was done to stop the practice of bigger financial businesses spreading those complaints over different companies in its group making these companies look better individually.
You would be forgiven for thinking that as the adjudicator and other roles were affectively abolished, there were redundancies. There were very few. The rest of us were moved to PPI which is now Mass Claims and also handles packaged bank accounts complaints. There was and still is I understand very little actual work for us there as most of the PPI complaints were already completed but just awaiting a court/FCA decision and our other work from our former jobs was slowly siphoned into the new structure. However, they have such little respect for us as people and employees that they effectively put us all on the scrap heap no doubt expecting us to leave and eventually when the bill is almost nothing they will fling a bit of money at the stragglers to get rid of them.
I think the FOS is in such a state that it has completely lost its way. It is now displaying a severely impaired ability to do the job it was created for. That was to objectively adjudicate financial services complaints ensuring a fair and reasonable outcome. I do not think that the decisions coming out of this organisation can be trusted whilst it insists on ignoring the obvious pitfalls created by this 'new way of working'.
My advice to my former colleagues is to leave. Nothing is worth what this place is doing to you. To new starters, under no circumstances take a job at this place. To consumers and businesses, I would try to sort the complaint out amicably between yourselves. If you have got this far, thank you for reading!