Adviser forum Panacea has slammed the Financial Ombudsman Service for the delay in its response to a Freedom of Information request.
Panacea Advisers’ founder and chief executive officer Derek Bradley submitted an FOI to the Fos on January 24 but said the response took over three months to come back.
According to the Fos website, it claims to respond “always within 20 working days” to FOI requests.
It stated: “If you're still unhappy after we've reviewed our response, you can contact the Information Commissioner's Office.”
However, Bradley did not receive a response until April 28, more than three months after submitting the request.
FTAdviser understands that the Fos is experiencing some delays in responding to FOI requests at the moment.
Meanwhile, in the FOI submitted by Panacea Adviser, Bradley asked the Fos about what percentage of staff have worked from home since March 16, 2020.
The Fos said: “During various periods since March 2020 - almost 100 per cent of our employees have worked from home, due to government restrictions.
“It’s difficult to provide a precise percentage of how many employees have worked from home since March 16, to date, as we’ve had changes in headcount since then and some employees have returned to the office sporadically in different periods over the last two years.”
This comes as earlier this year, the Fos admitted to having high attrition rates, putting it down to “throwing new people in at the deep end” as it looked to enhance its training programme.
Speaking at a session with the Treasury Committee in February, 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.
“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.”
It followed on from last October when the Fos was also offering staff “voluntary overtime” to tackle its cases backlog, just a few months after it made 200 redundancies in its mass claims teams.
Discussing the FOI, Bradley said: “It may have been better to have asked [the Fos] how many were working in the office. Perhaps they knew it was a little more than zero but thought it best not to go there given advisers' view of the Fos and its workings.”
The Fos also said since April 4, staff have been required to work from the office they were contractually employed to work from.
“Our current position is that any employee that tests positive for Covid-19 should not come into our offices until they have received a negative result. As our employees are office-based 40 per cent of the time, we do not request proof of positive Covid test results for self-isolation.”
Like the Financial Conduct Authority, which said its disciplinary policy may apply when there are no “exceptional circumstances” for staff not wanting to return to the office, for staff who refuse to return to the office, the Fos said it would “endeavour to investigate the employee’s reasons” for not returning and understand the circumstances before any action against its smarter working or hybrid policies.
“The investigation will determine whether there is a possible breach of this policy,” it said. “Breaches of policy are usually dealt with as part of our disciplinary policy and procedure.”
Elsewhere in the FOI, the Fos was asked how it monitors the productivity of those who are working from home.
It explained that managers received a lot of support initially when government guidelines said to work from home, such as ensuring they check in regularly with their colleagues.
The Fos said: “Managers generally monitor productivity and offer support through regular 1:1s and local management approaches.
“We’ve published guidance for managers on how to manage a smarter working team to support them in managing performance and optimising productivity.”
The ombudsman said measuring these aspects depends on the division as in casework, productivity and success is largely measured based on the number of resolved cases.
Yet, Bradley challenged the response as he said: “This is madness, what are advisers and consumers to deduce from this abject failure to do the work we as an industry are paying for?”
The Fos also said it does not have a London weighting for staff.
A spokesperson for the Fos said since restrictions lifted, it has been operating a "phased return".
"From April 2022 we moved to a hybrid model of working, where our people are in the office 40 per cent of the time. Despite the initial disruption of this new way of working, staff have continued to resolve hundreds of thousands of cases.
"2021-22 has been our strongest year in the past four years, in which we reduced our total number of cases, reduced our unallocated backlog of complaints from 90,000 to 34,400, and have seen a 12 per cent uptick in productivity. We are committed to changing and improving, and in line with our Action Plan we will be making further improvements this year.”
sonia.rach@ft.com
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