The data published today on the ombudsman's website covers consumer complaints handled by the ombudsman service between 1 January and 30 June 2012. The data includes both the number of complaints received about individual businesses and the percentage of complaints the ombudsman service upheld in favour of consumers.

During this six-month period, the ombudsman service received a total of 135,170 new complaints - a 27% increase on the previous period. Some 91% of the total number of cases came from 169 financial businesses (out of more than 100,000 businesses covered by the ombudsman).

Complaints about payment protection insurance (PPI) made up 63% of the total complaints received by the ombudsman during the first half of 2012 - with 85,562 new PPI complaints (compared to 49,419 in the last half of 2011). Five banking groups accounted for 71% of all new PPI cases received between 1 January and 30 June 2012. Across all businesses included in the data, the uphold rate for PPI complaints ranged from 5% to 98%.



In total the number of new complaints about each of the individual businesses ranged from 31 to 23,703. Five banking groups had more than 8,000 complaints each referred to the ombudsman service, together accounting for 80,235 cases - almost 60% of all new complaints in this six-month period.

Commenting on the complaint statistics released today, Natalie Ceeney, chief executive and chief ombudsman, said: “The volume of PPI complaints doubled in the first half of 2012 - and has continued to increase since then with up to 1,500 new cases now arriving each day. We've also seen an increasing shift towards consumers doing it themselves rather than using a claims manager - with up to half of all new complaints now coming directly from consumers without paid-for representation, compared to less than 20% a year ago.
“This means our consumer front-line is busier than ever - taking over 3,000 calls on PPI a day and bringing much needed clarity to confused and bewildered consumers.”