Seventeen thousand complaints have quietly vanished from the Financial Ombudsman’s in-tray this year, and not a single genuine consumer is a penny worse off. Read that sentence again. In a country where every well-meaning reform seems to wallop the wrong target — where the bloke who pays his telly licence subsidises the one who doesn’t, and the careful driver’s premium climbs to cover the fraudster’s whiplash — here is a rule change that landed square on the chin of the people it was aimed at. It deserves a small parade.
The backstory first, because the villainy here was of the quiet, paperwork-shaped variety. The Financial Ombudsman Service exists to settle rows between ordinary people and financial firms, and it has always been free for the ordinary person. The trouble was that it was also free for everyone else — specifically the claims management companies and no-win-no-fee outfits who long ago worked out that a free adjudicator plus a cut of any payout equals a business model. These are the folk who industrialised the PPI years, who filled a decade of daytime telly ad breaks and cold calls with “have YOU been mis-sold…”, and who lately have been feeding templated complaints into the system by the lorryload. Fire in ten thousand near-identical claims, let the ombudsman do the sifting, trouser a slice of whatever sticks. Regulators eventually had to cap the size of that slice, which tells you something about how generous the carving had become.
And when the ombudsman came back asking for actual evidence? A remarkable number of these cases were simply abandoned — dropped like a losing betting slip, often with the consumer whose name was on the complaint none the wiser. Every one of those duds still had to be opened, logged and chased by a caseworker, which meant real people with real grievances queuing behind a wall of speculative chaff.
Then, from April 2025, the ombudsman did something gloriously simple. It started charging professional representatives for the privilege. After a free allowance of ten cases a year — enough for any solicitor with a genuine client or two — each complaint costs £250, dropping to £75 if the case is upheld. Punters bringing their own complaints pay nothing, exactly as before. Nothing else changed. No new powers, no new quango, no consultation document the length of Middlemarch. Just a modest fee, pointed at precisely the right people.
The results, on the ombudsman’s own figures, are the sort of thing policy wonks dream about in the bath. Complaints lodged by professional representatives have fallen by around 17,000. The proportion of cases abandoned partway through — the surest fingerprint of the spray-and-pray merchants — has roughly halved. And, best of all, consumers have come flooding back to bring their complaints directly, for free, discovering in the process that the ombudsman was never some priesthood requiring a paid intermediary to interpret its mysteries. You fill in a form. You tell your story. Somebody sensible has a look.
Why does it work so beautifully? Because it introduces the one thing the racket never had: skin in the game. A representative who genuinely believes in a case pays £75 net and moves on. A representative flinging mud at the wall pays £250 per splat. It’s the pound coin in the shopping trolley — a trivial sum to anyone using the trolley properly, and a perfectly calibrated deterrent to anyone planning to wheel it into a canal. Economists have a fancy name for taxes that price in the damage you cause. The rest of us can just call it charging the chancers.
Compare that with the usual run of fees in British life, which have a magnetic attraction to the blameless. Booking fees for the person who booked. Admin charges for the tenant who did nothing but exist. The genius here is the inversion: the cost lands on the volume operator, and the individual — the actual mug who was mis-sold the thing in the first place — keeps a free, functioning route to justice. The queue in front of them just got 17,000 cases shorter.
A clear-eyed caveat, because battle-hardened hope is still hope with its eyes open. Not every claims firm is a grifter; some have dragged compensation out of banks for people who would never have complained alone, and there may be genuine cases among the vanished thousands that a nervous representative now won’t touch. Worth watching. But the fee structure already answers most of that worry: a firm that wins gets most of its money back. If your business can’t survive £75 on a victory, your business was never really about winning.
There’s a lesson here that deserves to travel well beyond financial services, into every corner of British life where a middleman has wedged himself between a citizen and a free public service and started charging rent on the doorway. You don’t always need a crackdown, a taskforce or a minister on the Today programme. Sometimes you just need a trolley pound.
For once, the meter is running on the middlemen. Long may it tick.