Pluspunten
The cooked breakfasts and the diverse backgrounds of the staff who mainly do their best.
Minpunten
1. I can genuinely say I felt bullied, marginalised, humiliated and helpless at FOS. Why? Because unless you were a ‘favourite’ you were never going to be promoted, no matter how hard you worked and irrespective of how competent you were. I felt that only extreme crawling and flirting with senior colleagues would get you noticed – and I saw too much of that and would never stoop. And, to loosely follow a quote from Ford (he of the Ford Motor Company): “You can have any opinion you want so long as you agree.” This is why so many incompetent people now hold positions far up the pay scale, and this is why an ill thought out restructure has been nodded through. 2. I could not stand having to build relationships with complainants, knowing I was going to disappoint them. Some cases – such as fixed rate business loans – were deliberately ‘put to one side’ for years before an approach was formulated. What this really means is that nobody senior wanted to put their name to an approach, leading to a perpetual bottleneck. Having to fob people off – especially when they tell you that they are on the brink of losing their home or that they have nothing to feed their children – is very hard. I felt terrible. Who wouldn’t? But you either tow the official line of you lose your job and your ability to pay rent/mortgage. The Ombudsman talks about being ‘bold and decisive’ although it is anything but. 3. Some people here talk about how those unhappy with the way things are should just leave. But that is wrong on two counts. The first is that some people genuinely care about levelling the playing field between banks and consumers and the FOS is the one place that (theoretically) can do that. Others, like myself, graduated into the recession. Our intended career paths were destroyed early on and when we saw that the FOS was recruiting we saw this as a potential career opportunity. But, once there, it is extremely hard to leave. You are not taught much about financial products – only the extreme basics – and most of my knowledge came from financial exams that I decided to take or research on Google. Now employers have wised up to the fact that investigators deliberately are not taught much, and many have frozen recruitment from the FOS. It is a terrible shame for the staff (especially the non-managers – see below) who do their best. A workman really can blame his/her tools in this case. 4. Managers are almost always dreadful. I can say with complete sincerity that most of my managers would spend their day whispering to their favourites (and ensuring that the favourites got any of the slim opportunities for progression) or tapping away on their phone. Or simply surfing the internet. They bullied their team with demands for ‘stretch targets’ week on week that invariably meant quality was cut. I became depressed during my time at FOS, and a large part of the reason why was the managers. I can say hand on heart that most of my managers were vindictive because they had nothing else to occupy them and went out of their way to make my life as difficult as possible. I cannot say what here as that would identify me – but the fact that these people are not ‘Ombudsman Managers’ speaks volumes about the very poor state the FOS is now in. 5. The targets are not realistic. In fact, the target never stops – even if you get married, it’s Christmas or a relative has died. The target keeps on plodding away in the background, meaning you have to put in insane hours if you dare to take any annual leave. I would often take cases home on weekends and work 10-12 hours a day in the office. Meanwhile managers, who have no target and know nothing about financial products, would saunter in at 10:00 and leave at 16:00. 6. The restructure has been directed terribly. We once received an email explaining that for the FOS to continue working as it was it would have to charge over £700 per case by way of a case fee to the bank being complained about. Anybody who has gone on the Bank of England inflation calculator can plainly see that had the old case fee (£500) been increased in line with inflation the FOS should be charging banks almost £800 a case. The fact that a ‘new’ £550 case fee was introduced effectively reset the case fee at a lower monetary amount. There are none so blind as those who cannot see.