PPI made up two thirds of complaints to FOS in 2014/15

Complaints about payment protection insurance (PPI) accounted for two-thirds of all queries made to the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) in 2014/15.

This is despite the number of PPI complaints halving to 204,943 from the record highs of 2013/14.

According to its annual review released today, in the same period the FOS answered 1.8 million enquiries and resolved 448,000 cases, compared with 400,000 enquiries and 30,000 in 2000/01.

Chief ombudsman Caroline Wayman said: “The world has moved on and changed significantly since I first joined the ombudsman as an adjudicator in 2001.

“Yet our workload over the past 15 years has been constantly dominated by the past – clearing up the fall-out of the mass claims and mis-selling scandals of the past decade and a half.

“But 15 years of sorting out millions of these problems have given us unparalleled experience, knowledge and understanding of why complaints happen – and how they could be avoided in future.

”That’s why our focus continues to be on complaints prevention and sorting things out pragmatically as soon as problems emerge.

“That’s also why it’s so important that lessons are learned from what’s gone wrong in the past – to prevent yesterday’s problems from becoming tomorrow’s complaints – and to help ensure financial services evolve to meet the needs of today’s customers.”