When Faster Complaint Resolution Becomes a Weaker Measure of Justice
The Financial Ombudsman Service has appointed Jenny Simmonds as permanent chief executive and James Dipple-Johnstone as permanent chief ombudsman, after both had occupied the positions on an interim basis since February 2025.
The announcement praised improvements in operational performance. In particular, the Financial Ombudsman Service was said to have reduced the time taken to resolve complaints and cut the number of cases that had been with it the longest.
At first sight, these sound like sensible measures of progress.
Nobody wants consumers waiting years for an answer. Long backlogs can deepen financial hardship, prolong uncertainty and allow firms to defer responsibility. A faster ombudsman ought to be better than a slower one.
But there is a problem hidden inside the language.
A complaint can be “resolved” without the underlying injustice being resolved.
It can be rejected as outside the Ombudsman’s jurisdiction. It can be closed because evidence was considered insufficient. It can be withdrawn after a consumer becomes exhausted, confused or unable to continue. It can be determined in favour of the firm.
Each of these outcomes reduces the backlog.
None necessarily restores the consumer.
That creates a fundamental measurement problem:
Is the Financial Ombudsman Service measuring the speed at which complaints leave its system, or the quality of justice citizens receive from it?
The visible event
The appointments follow a substantial programme of reform involving the Financial Ombudsman Service, the Financial Conduct Authority and HM Treasury.
The Government describes these reforms as returning the Ombudsman to its original role as a fast and impartial dispute-resolution service, while creating greater certainty for consumers and firms. The FCA has similarly connected reform of the redress framework with regulatory predictability, investment and innovation.
Operationally, progress appears to have been made. The Ombudsman has increased its focus on timeliness, digital access and reducing older caseloads. These are legitimate management objectives.
But timeliness is only one dimension of justice.
A hospital would not measure success merely by how quickly patients left the building. A court would not measure justice solely by the number of cases removed from its list. A fire service would not define success as closing incidents quickly, irrespective of whether the fire had been extinguished.
In each case, throughput matters.
But throughput is not the purpose.
The hidden pattern
This is a familiar institutional pattern: what is easiest to count gradually becomes what the organisation is managed to achieve.
Cases opened. Cases closed. Average handling time. Oldest cases removed. Cost per decision.
These are administratively convenient measures. They can be compared across years, incorporated into executive objectives and presented as evidence of improved performance.
But they create an asymmetry.
The institution can count when a complaint leaves its workflow. It is much harder to measure whether the complainant understood the decision, felt heard, recovered what was lost or retained confidence in the system.
This gives rise to what might be called the Resolution Illusion:
A case can be administratively complete while the citizen’s problem remains substantively unresolved.
That distinction becomes especially important for victims of financial exploitation.
Such cases are rarely neat. Evidence may be distributed across years of communications, payments and relationships. The consumer may be traumatised, elderly, bereaved or dealing with diminished confidence and cognitive overload. The alleged failure may involve not one obviously incorrect transaction, but a sequence of missed warnings, inadequate interventions and institutional decisions.
A system optimised for rapid classification may experience these cases as difficult, expensive and resistant to standardisation.
The citizen experiences them as the most important case of their life.
When fewer complaints may not mean less harm
The Ombudsman reported receiving 214,600 new complaints in 2025/26, almost 30 per cent fewer than the previous year. It upheld approximately 30 per cent of the complaints it resolved. In 2024/25, it had received 305,726 complaints and upheld 34 per cent.
A falling number of complaints can indicate improvement. Firms may be treating customers better. Problems may be resolved earlier. Poor practices may be disappearing.
But complaint volumes are not a pure measure of underlying harm.
They are also influenced by awareness, accessibility, evidential requirements, jurisdictional rules, time limits, procedural complexity and the availability of support.
Since April 2025, professional representatives have generally been charged to refer cases after an annual allowance. The representative pays a higher fee where the complaint is not upheld and receives a substantial credit where the consumer succeeds. For 2026/27, the charges are £260 for cases found in favour of the firm and £80 for cases found in favour of the represented consumer.
The stated purpose is to discourage poorly evidenced or low-merit complaints. The Ombudsman reports that representative-led submissions have fallen and that their uphold rate has increased.
That may demonstrate improved case selection.
It may also create a selection effect.
Representatives now have a financial incentive to avoid cases that are complex, novel, evidentially difficult or unlikely to succeed under the Ombudsman’s established interpretation. Those may include some of the cases in which vulnerable consumers most need assistance.
The question is not whether every professionally represented complaint deserves to succeed. Clearly it does not.
The question is whether a fall in complaints is being treated as evidence of a healthier market without first asking:
Are fewer people being harmed, or are fewer people able to bring harm into view?
Growth and the purpose of redress
The reforms also sit within a wider government agenda to promote financial-services growth and international competitiveness. Official consultation documents explicitly connect redress reform with predictability for firms, investment and innovation.
Predictability is valuable. Firms should be able to understand the rules under which they operate. An inconsistent or retrospective redress system can create uncertainty, discourage investment and ultimately increase costs for consumers.
But redress exists partly because the consumer and the financial institution do not meet as equals.
The firm possesses specialist knowledge, records, legal resources, compliance functions and repeated experience of disputes. The consumer may encounter the system only once, after suffering a significant loss.
The Ombudsman is therefore not simply another component of the industry’s operating environment. It is part of the civic infrastructure intended to rebalance that inequality.
Growth can be one consideration.
It cannot become the purpose against which justice is calibrated.
Otherwise, a subtle institutional inversion takes place:
The redress system stops asking how the industry should serve citizens and begins asking how citizens’ claims can be made less disruptive to the industry.
There is no evidence in the appointment announcement that the permanent appointments were a reward for producing industry-friendly outcomes. It would be wrong to present that inference as fact.
But the incentives deserve scrutiny.
When government makes growth a central regulatory priority, institutions redesign their processes around predictability, and the leaders responsible for delivering those reforms receive permanent appointments, the public is entitled to ask what forms of performance the system rewards.
Not because the individuals involved are necessarily acting improperly.
Because institutional incentives shape behaviour even when everyone believes they are acting reasonably.
Better measures of ombudsman performance
The answer is not to abandon timeliness targets. Delayed justice can itself become denied justice.
The answer is to balance operational measures with a broader Citizen Justice Scorecard.
That scorecard might include five dimensions.
1. Access to justice
Measure how many eligible consumers abandon the process, fail to progress beyond initial contact or cannot obtain appropriate assistance.
Track outcomes for vulnerable consumers, litigants without representation and people bringing complex financial-exploitation complaints.
A service cannot be described as accessible merely because an online form exists.
2. Procedural fairness
Ask whether consumers understood the process, knew what evidence was required and believed the Ombudsman had engaged with the substance of their case.
Publish data on complaints closed for jurisdictional, procedural and evidential reasons—not simply cases “resolved”.
A fair outcome begins with a fair opportunity to be heard.
3. Substantive justice
Measure whether decisions properly identify consumer harm and provide an effective remedy.
This could include independent sampling of rejected and jurisdictionally excluded cases, consistency reviews and analysis of decisions later contradicted by courts, regulators or emerging evidence.
The uphold rate alone cannot answer this question. A low uphold rate could reflect better behaviour by firms, weak complaints or an overly restrictive decision framework.
4. Consumer restoration
Measure what happened after the decision.
Was compensation paid promptly? Was the person’s financial position repaired? Did the firm correct records, remove harmful markers or change the disputed arrangement? Did the consumer receive enough explanation to move forward?
Redress should be measured by restoration, not merely adjudication.
5. Prevention and public trust
Track whether the same firms, products and failure patterns continue generating complaints.
Publish repeat-harm indicators and measure public confidence among people who have actually used the service—not simply general brand awareness.
The strongest ombudsman is not the one that processes ever more harm efficiently.
It is the one whose work helps prevent the harm from recurring.
The emerging alternative
Consumer-side AI could strengthen this accountability.
A properly designed public-interest system could help individuals assemble timelines, identify missing evidence, understand jurisdictional rules and compare the reasoning in their case with published Ombudsman decisions.
It could also aggregate anonymised patterns across complaints, revealing where similar cases are repeatedly excluded, rejected or fragmented into categories that conceal systemic harm.
This would not replace the Ombudsman.
It would reduce the informational imbalance between the institution and the citizen.
The future of redress should not depend upon consumers becoming expert litigators, nor upon everyone paying a professional representative to make their case intelligible.
It should build the consumer’s capability to understand what happened, present the evidence and challenge an inadequate response.
That is the wider transition the Academy of Life Planning is documenting.
Industry Stories show why the old model is under pressure.
Planner Stories show professionals building the alternative.
Agency Stories show what changes for the individual.
The open question
Faster decisions matter. Smaller backlogs matter. Efficient public institutions matter.
But these are means, not ends.
The true purpose of an ombudsman is not to make complaints disappear. It is to ensure that citizens can challenge concentrated institutional power and receive a fair, comprehensible and effective remedy.
So perhaps the defining KPI should not be:
How many complaints did we resolve?
It should be:
How many citizens emerged with justice restored, confidence strengthened and less chance of the same harm happening to someone else?
Because a complaint closed is an administrative outcome.
A citizen restored is a public one.
Advice out. Agency in.
Academy of Life Planning 