Life and pension complaints plummet

by Gill Montia

Story link: Life and pension complaints plummet

The Financial Services Authority (FSA) has published aggregate figures showing the volume of complaints regulated firms have received from their customers.

The data, which is the first of its kind to be published by the regulator, covers the period 2006 to 2008, during which time the overall number of complaints increased by 5.7%, from 1.4 million to 1.48 million.

However, the number of complaints in the life and pensions category showed a 76% decline in the second half of 2008, compared with the first half of 2006.

Meanwhile, complaints about general insurance and other types of pure insurance more than doubled during the period, from 62,000 to 127,000, mostly because of problems with payment protection insurance.

The number of complaints relating to misleading advice fell by 59% over the two-year period and the FSA suggests a possible reason for this is a reduction in the number of mortgage endowment complaints, which mainly related to mis-selling.

For life and pensions and general and pure protection Insurance, misleading advice was the biggest issue, at 35% and 25% respectively.

In the case of investments, poor customer service generated the most complaints at 21%.

For all regulated firms, complaints about poor customer service increased by 28%, from 187,000 to 239,500.

The speed of firms’ complaints handling and the proportion of complaints upheld by firms remained fairly stable over the period.

At the end of 2008, 10% of complaints took longer than eight weeks to resolve and 40% of complaints were decided in customers’ favour.

The FSA plans to publish aggregate data covering the first half of 2009 in October, and will then publish updates every six months following.