Enormous numbers may still complain about PPI, says ombudsman

Caroline Wayman, the chief financial ombudsman

The Financial Ombudsman Service is handling around 3,000 new cases a week related to the alleged mis-selling of personal protection insurance (PPI), almost a decade after the financial crash.

Caroline Wayman, the chief financial ombudsman, said that the numbers of people who could still come forward to complain about PPI is “pretty enormous”.

It’s estimated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) that 45m PPI policies were sold between 1990 and 2010, worth £44bn in premiums. Some people were sold multiple PPI policies.

From April to December 2016, the financial ombudsman service received 121,557 new complaints on PPI, and upheld around 54 per cent of them.

For the same period in 2015, the ombudsman received 141,366 new PPI complaints, upholding 70 per cent of them.

Another area of concern is the rising number of complaints related to payday lenders. From April to December 2016, the ombudsman received 7,810 new complaints about payday lenders, compared with just 1,669 new complaints for the same period in 2015.

Ms Wayman told The Yorkshire Post: “We’re getting around about 3,000 (PPI cases) a week still, so that’s still significant numbers. At its height, we were getting about 12,000 a week, which is absolutely unprecedented.

“Being able to forecast our PPI caseload is particularly challenging because there are so many uncertainties for the year ahead.”

She added: “The pool of potential people to come forward is still pretty enormous.”

Over the last decade, the financial ombudsman has received around 1.6m new complaints about PPI.

Ms Wayman said she took the view that if more than a third of complaints were upheld “something is going on that isn’t quite right”.

In December, the FCA said it will make a further announcement in the first quarter of this year with regards to deadlines for making PPI complaints.

“Our biggest growing area this year has been payday lending,’’ Ms Wayman said. “We think it’s at least in part about the fact that some payday lenders have been required by the FCA to go back and compensate customers.

“We’ve done a lot of work to try and increase awareness amongst consumers that the ombudsman is a place you can come to if you’ve got a payday lending issue.