Six Months. Eighty Percent. And the Slow Erosion of Trust at the Financial Ombudsman Service.

The Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) exists for one reason, to provide an independent, fair resolution when a financial firm and its customer cannot agree. That “fair and reasonable” promise is the entire point of the institution.

So when FOS publicly sets an operational target to resolve over 80% of cases within six months, it expects us to applaud the ambition. Who wouldn’t want faster answers?

But here’s where FOS falls into an uncomfortable and repeated trap as speed targets do not exist in a vacuum. They change behaviour, rewire priorities and without ruthless safeguards, they reward closure over competence, throughput over truth, and “done” over “right”.

And if that sounds familiar, it should.

A target is never “just a target”

On paper, “80% within six months” looks like a service standard. In practice, it is something else entirely. It is a a performance management tool that quietly incentivises the wrong outcome.

Because what does a six-month clock actually reward?

• Not the best reasoning.
• Not the most rigorous evidence gathering.
• Not the careful handling of complex matters.
• Not specialist product knowledge.

It rewards moving the taking the file off the desk.

When the dominant organisational message is “hit the number,” people adapt, often through incentives. They triage toward what’s easiest to close. They narrow the scope of what they consider. They avoid reopening lines of enquiry that create delay. They treat ambiguity as inconvenience rather than as a reason to dig deeper.

This isn’t speculation. It’s basic incentive design. When a metric becomes the goal, the work bends to serve the metric, not the public. That is not just a FOS problem. It’s a systems problem. But it becomes catastrophic when the “product” is justice for ordinary people.

Quality doesn’t survive on slogans

FOS will understandably point to internal quality scoring and improvements, whose definition of “quality” counts most? Is it internal dashboard, or is it the lived experience of complainants who feel their case wasn’t properly understood?

We regularly see investigations that feel alarmingly familiar:

• superficial and inadequate fact-finding
• critical documents not meaningfully engaged with
• misunderstood products and processes
• weak reasoning dressed up as certainty
• “template thinking” where nuance is required

Far too often, our opinion is that cases are being handled by people who appear under-prepared, ill-informed and too inexperienced for the complexity and stakes involved.

This is not a personal attack on individual employees. Many will be doing their best inside a machine that pushes speed. The problem is institutional. If you design the system to prioritise quantity over quality, it is exactly what you will achieve.

We’ve been here before: Dispatches, 2018

This is the part that should set alarm bells ringing.

In 2018, Channel 4’s Dispatches aired an undercover investigation focused on FOS. Whatever view you take of the programme, it triggered parliamentary scrutiny and a formal (if inadequate) response from FOS.

A review followed. And crucially, it focused on pressure to deal with caseloads quickly which can distort outcomes and introduce new risks to casework quality.

When FOS doubles down on timeliness targets as a headline ambition without equally loud, equally measurable guarantees on investigative depth and specialist competence, it feels like an institution walking back toward a cliff edge it has already stood on.

The numbers can look good while the service gets worse

Here is the quiet danger of a target like “80% within six months”. It can be achieved while still delivering a degraded service, because the metric doesn’t measure:

• whether evidence was properly tested
• whether the investigator understood the product
• whether the reasoning is coherent and consistent
• whether the outcome reflects what is fair and reasonable
• whether complex cases were given the time and expertise they need

It measures time to closure.

Closure can be manufactured. A system under pressure can “resolve” complaints by narrowing what it is willing to investigate, pushing informal outcomes that don’t truly address the dispute, relying on quick assumptions instead of hard verification, or discouraging escalation because escalation costs time.

If you doubt that institutions can drift into this, look at what happens when public bodies become obsessed with throughput targets in any sector – healthcare, policing, education, benefits administration. The outcome is predictable, the metric improves, the experience deteriorates.

Complaints reducing due to imposed barriers

Perhaps FOS is pushing the target as it predicts, and is seeing, a rapid decrease in the number of complaints it is receiving. It isn’t shy in giving itself a huge pat on the back, but fails to see the reason for the decrease.

FOS imposed fees for representatives to bring complaints on behalf of consumers, claiming that this would stop meritless complaints being escalated to its service. But it failed to consider the impact on vulnerable consumers, many of which seek professional representation.

Representatives are not against costs being paid, but have argued that a fair system would be for FOS to seek costs from a losing party (the lender or the representative). As things stand, both lenders and representatives pay regardless, and FOS’ current position only serves to benefit lenders and put barriers up to justice for the most vulnerable in society, the very people it needs to protect.

A separate but revealing scandal: our FOI request and the silence

Now to transparency, because if FOS wants public confidence, it must accept public scrutiny.

We submitted a Freedom of Information (FOI) request to FOS in November asking, in part, for information about exactly the kind of operational pressures and closure incentives that can undermine casework quality. We were promised a response by 17th December 2025.

Yet we are still waiting. We have chased. We have been ignored. So we will escalate to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).

If the information is harmless and doesn’t suggest consumer harm or service standard issues, why won’t they disclose it? FOS cannot demand trust while refusing transparency

What FOS should measure instead (if it’s serious about public confidence)

If FOS wants to be faster, fine. But it must stop treating speed as the headline virtue over getting it right.

Here are better, harder questions:

• How often are decisions changed because the investigation missed key evidence?
• How often do ombudsman decisions overturn investigator views, and why?
• What proportion of complaints raise “adequacy of investigation” as a concern?
• How is specialist competence assessed and maintained by product area and complexity?
• How many cases are reopened due to internal process failures?
• What is the error rate under independent audit sampling, and what is done about it?

In other words, measure quality like it matters.

Because it does.

Final thought: “fast injustice” is not a public service

FOS is not a call centre. It is not a quota factory. It is not a backlog-clearance operation.

It is supposed to be a cornerstone of consumer protection, a place people go when the power imbalance is real and the stakes are personal.

If FOS turns its culture into “close cases quickly,” it doesn’t just harm individual complainants. It poisons confidence in the entire redress system.

And that is the ultimate cost of targets worshipped in isolation, you can hit 80% in six months and still fail the public.