It has been over a year since the Legal Ombudsman launched its CMC complaints jurisdiction.
Claims Media recently caught up with the Ombudsman’s head of CMCs, Simon Tunnicliffe, to find out how the complaints handling process is going and what it means for the future if the CMC sector.
CM: How have the first 12 months been?
ST: They’ve gone very well, and very quickly, I’m extremely proud of what we’ve achieved. It’s been an exciting time of change for us at the Legal Ombudsman, we’ve learnt a lot and we’ve helped a significant amount of consumers who have suffered as a result of their interactions with CMCs. We’ve also helped a number of CMCs by feeding back our insights and helping them with best practice.
CM: Has anything surprised you so far?
ST: We went with an intentional soft launch so allowing ourselves time to develop and grow. I wouldn’t say that anything has necessarily surprised me since we went live, but what we have been really pleased with is the interaction and co-operation that we’ve had with a significant amount of the CMCs that we’ve dealt with.
I think, perhaps unfairly, that there’s a perception that it could be a difficult industry to engage with before we went live and shared our experiences, but we haven’t found that at all and haven’t found that generally. There have been some problems with some companies, but they’ve generally been in the minority.
CM: How many complaints have you had and how many have led to further action? Are most of the complaints related to PPI CMCs?
ST: We’ve had just over 20,000 contacts and we’ve accepted just over 2000 complaints and have resolved 1,473 cases. 580 of these were from consumers who had contacted us prematurely previously.
In the latter part of last year we did see an increase in our work. But that was impacted by the closure of one significant CMC. We are steadily getting bigger in respect of the cases that we are getting.
The heavy majority have been relation to financial products and services and the vast proportion of those relate to PPI. That’s not a big shock to us. That was part of our planning assumptions and something that we thought would be the case.
CM: What is your working relationship with the Claims Management Regulator like?
ST: We have a very positive working relationship with the CM Regulator. They were key and fundamental to us when we were in the start-up and project planning phase, because there was no regulatory body that dealt with complaints against CMCs. So we established relationships with them early on and we continue to establish those relationships and continue to meet with them on a regular basis.
We discuss the projects and work that we have in place, as well as look over what they’re doing and we share intelligence and insight. From our investigations we make referrals to them where we see potential issues in relation to breaches of the rules so we have regular face-to-face meetings.
CM: Do you think your work is helping to clean up the CMC market?
ST: I’m committed to the CMC industry and improving standards within it. And we’ve gone quite a way in doing that.
There’s more work that we can do, but through our work with relationship management pilots that we’ve put in place, and professional learning courses and information that we share, we’ve set some really good foundations for the industry. We are constantly providing feedback and helping them to get better at dealing with complaints in the first instance.
It’s one of our strategic priorities, that we’re going to share what we’ve experienced. We’ve worked hard to provide a number of channels in locations around the country to make sure we’re accessible. We’ve set up programmes of support for the early stages of a complaint so that CMCs can ask for guidance and sup