3rd May 2011

FOS failures- Fact or Fiction?

The number of respondents and the sheer passion of the comments in our FOS survey in April show very clearly that something is wrong.

The FOS say the survey does not adhere to "good market research practice" according to a report in FT Adviser.

"Well they would wouldn’t they", to borrow a well quoted and apt phrase of Mandy Rice Davies, famous mainly for her role in the Profumo affair which discredited the Conservative government of British Prime-Minister Harold Macmillan in 1963 when replying to the defence barrister Lord Astor who put it that one of the men on a certain list had denied any involvement with her.

As one IFA commented in Money Marketing “302 of its members- now that’s a survey. Better than the three Australian firms used by the FSA to justify culling 30% of advisers and £1.7b to £3.10b RDR costs”!

It may be that the IFA perception of what the FOS should do and how it goes about it is wrong, or it may be that the FOS has lost whatever direction and good intentions it had.

So how do you set about proving that the view presented by our IFA survey is correct?

Well the starting point is Mark Garnier MP who is very troubled by what he sees but needs to see facts by way of examples to do more. It is clear to all that the FOS is seeing itself above the law and fuels its possibly unlawful actions by hiding behind the skirts of “Mama” at the FSA who gave it its powers and is itself unaccountable to all except possibly Parliament.

We need your facts now relating to poor adjudications, false or fraudulent claims, poor adjudicator industry understanding, lack of or even no evidence resulting in a complaint succeeding, erratic changes of decisions and levels of compensation calculation etc.

These facts should be sent in summary form only at this stage to james@panaceaadviser.com so that we can build a trend dossier to present to Mark Garnier and other interested parties, more detailed evidence can then be collated where appropriate to demonstrate hard facts in these trends.

We need your help to help IFAs see some balance return to a badly thought out system, that if the survey is to be believed, has gone very wrong.

Please send your evidence today or post a summary below.

 

Regulation, Panacea Comment

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