Fos struggles to retain staff amid training concerns

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Fos struggles to retain staff amid training concerns
Nausicaa Delfas, interim chief executive and chief ombudsman at the Fos

The Financial Ombudsman Service has admitted to having high attrition rates, putting it down to “throwing new people in at the deep end” as it looks to enhance its training programme.

Speaking at a session with the Treasury Committee today (February 9), Baroness Zahida Manzoor, chairperson at the Fos said when she took over in her role in 2019, around 45 per cent of investigators had been with the service for less than two years.

She said: “Our attrition rate is high and I do think that we have thrown new people into the deep end a little bit.

“I think the organisational design that the team are looking at and developing will alleviate that problem a lot.

“Some of our most experienced and highly trained ombudsmen had their time taken up training these individuals so it is very important that we get it right.”

Nausicaa Delfas, interim chief executive and chief ombudsman at the Fos, added that historically, people were trained on all areas of financial services.

But to streamline this, the Fos focused the training in a particular area so that a case handler can pass through the academy  and build their confidence and expertise in the area they have been trained in. 

But the Fos is looking to change its training structure going forward.

Delfas said: "Going forward through our action plan, we want to enhance our training capabilities so that we can train more people at all levels as well."

Manzoor argued that the attrition rates were not down to pay, stating that Fos pays a very high level within the top quartile for benefits. 

“We want to make sure we're attracting skilled and experienced people, not just from the finance sector, because we are an alternative dispute resolution and so therefore, a lot of common sense approach is also just as valuable as the intellectual rigour and capability.”

The Treasury Committee questioned both Manzoor and Delfas on how the Fos is tackling the attrition rate, as well as how it is aiding staff with stressful working conditions and hybrid working. 

Delfas said: “We will look at the way in which we attract and retain people, and we expect that the changes that we are making will actually make things more satisfying and make the roles more satisfying for people. 

“We look very carefully at [the attrition] and seek to address it in the way that we recruit in the way we train and so forth. It's an important marker for us.”

The interim chief explained that dealing with the stress is part of the training that it provides at the outset and all case handlers are trained on dealing with customers who may be in distress or who may be particularly vulnerable.

“We need to close the cost and revenue gap”

MPs also questioned the Fos on its recently proposed action plan, which sets out strategic and operational changes and its leadership’s assessment of the current state of the organisation.

Delfas explained that when she took over the role in May last year, her first impressions on the challenges was that too many people were having to wait too long for their complaints to be resolved with large queues of cases. 

She explained that she felt the operating structure of the Fos was “too complicated and not efficient enough” and the processes really needed to be clearer and simpler. 

“It seemed to me that the organisation could be more proactive and I mean in two senses; one more assertive in case management, and two in its engagement with stakeholders. 

“That's why since I joined I've been focused on two key priorities: one was getting through the cases, getting through those queues and strategically resetting the organisation for the future.”

She explained that the ombudsman needed to make the casework operating model clearer and simpler by having more focus on industry specialisms and clearer lines of accountability.

“The way that the organisation was working was quite a generalist model where people had a variety of responsibilities, which makes it difficult to really drive performance, but that's one of the things that we're looking to change,” she said. 

The Fos started the financial year with a backlog of 90,000 complaints, but this has since halved to around 43,000.

Delfas said that it has made a commitment to have no cases older than 18 months old by the end of this financial year, unless there was a reason beyond its control to prevent that such as judicial review.

Currently, if someone went to the Fos today, it would take on average, around seven months for their case to be resolved.

Delfas said: "We expect with the changes we're making we'll be able to have an average of four months and that is what we want to achieve."

In December, the Fos pledged to go “further and faster” as it launched an action plan addressing the changes it will make to its operating model.

Following this, the Treasury Committee session wrote to the Fos about its action plan in, requesting further information on its new action plan to tackle its case backlog.

The action plan set out how the Fos will aim to improve its delivery for customers and provide help to resolve cases more quickly.

In response to the letter last month, Delfas said the Fos will spend £300,000 on external advisers to help design and implement reforms to its operating model.

sonia.rach@ft.com

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