Complaints Commissioner condemns FCA's 'defensiveness' and 'lack of empathy'

In its 2017/18 annual; report, the Commissioner, Antony Townsend, says that "more needs to be done to promote an open and empathetic culture" within the regulator when dealing with complaints.

Townsend found that while most complaints are handled well, the FCA has an "unwillingness to admit error" and spends too much time "constructing defences for past actions".

The Complaints Commissioner formally investigated 83 complaints regarding the FCA in 2017/18, almost double the 45 investigated the year before.

In 67 instances complainants alleged that the FCA was failing to regulate the financial services industry properly, and in many cases this hinged on a specific firm as an example.

The Commissioner upheld the large majority of the FCA’s decisions, However in many of these cases, the Commissioner also made suggestions for process improvement.

More positively, Townsend says that since the previous year's report, which drew attention to some serious problems with delays in handling complaints, "a concerted effort" has been made by the FCA in dealing with the serious backlog and there is "no longer a systemic problem".

Responding to the findings, the FCA said: “We do accept that we could seem defensive sometimes and we will work on how to communicate in a more effective and transparent way. We believe that approaching complainants with empathy is essential [and] occasionally we know we could have done better in recognising the impact that we have.”