Ombudsman angry about endowment mortgage mis-selling

The Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) is being "buried" by complaints over the mis-selling of endowment mortgages.

The FOS has said that banks are avoiding dealing with complaints themselves, seeing the number of problems being dealt with by the FOS climb by 40 per cent to an expected 70,000 this year, and seriously delaying the amount of time taken to solve the issues.

FOS spokesman, David Cresswell, said: "For every 100 endowment complaints made to some companies, 20 are reaching us: this should not be happening.

"With other financial products we get two or three complaints for every 100 made to the company."

The body added that cases were now taking much longer to clear.

"Normally, we would expect to complete 45 per cent of cases within three months, 70 per cent within six months, and 80 per cent within nine months, but with mortgage endowment complaints, we are probably taking around three to four months for a case to be allocated," he explained.

The sudden increase in workload has prompted a recruitment drive by the FOS which is to hire an extra 100 people, doubling its headcount to 950 by the end of the year.