CHL’s statistics reveal that of the 10 decisions it received from FOS in the first half of the year all but one judgement was made in its favour. In addition to this, the lender received 77 complaints during the January to June 2013 period – it agreed to uphold two itself while 12 have been referred to the Ombudsman.
Overall the latest data from FOS appears to show a growing trend for complaints particularly against the larger banks. FOS said it received a total of 327,035 new complaints during the first half of the year which have been made against 195 financial businesses. Eight out of 10 complaints received were related to the sale of Payment Protection Insurance (PPI) products. FOS upheld an average of 64% of complaints in the consumer’s favour; for PPI the resolved case figure is 75%.
In the mortgages and home finance category, the top three firms for most new cases received by FOS were Bank of Scotland (927), Santander UK (774) and Northern Rock (Asset Management) (676). The total percentage of all cases resolved in the consumer’s favour for this category was 26% although this was considerably higher for lenders such as Southern Pacific Mortgage Ltd (47%), Barclays Bank (41%) and Clydesdale Bank (36%).
CHL do not appear in the official FOS statistics as the data released only covers financial businesses where it received 30 new cases and resolved at least 30 cases within the period.
Bob Young, Managing Director of CHL Mortgages, commented:
“It has always been our policy to follow the publication of the Ombudsman’s complaints data by issuing our own figures for the same period. This allows us to be as transparent as possible about the level of complaints we are receiving and is a key indicator not just on the performance of the book but our historical lending policy and our ability to deal with the complaints we receive.
I have always felt that our complaint handling, the way we deal with complaints, and our communication with both our borrowers and FOS should be second to none. To this end, each and every complaint we receive is reviewed by the senior management team and this is a process which has been highly successful and one we will be continuing with.
“We are pleased not just with the low level of complaints we continue to receive but also the very small number which have been upheld by FOS when they have been referred. This is perhaps even more impressive when you bear in mind that we continue to manage more than 40,000 live mortgage accounts. The very small number of complaints we receive should also be reviewed against our lending peer group.
While we have yet to appear on the official FOS list because of our low numbers, there are many who make continuous appearances. We put our small complaint rates down to the quality of our underwriting and processes and the fact that we are very much a hands-on and personal lender that wants to know our customers fully and make sure they are happy with our service. We will continue to focus on keeping complaints to a bare minimum and to ensuring that those we do receive are handled sensitively and appropriately.”
