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From: "Hoyland, Alison" <Alison.Hoyland@financial-ombudsman.org.uk >

To:
Date: 09/21/2012 6:16 PM
Subject: RE: Staff discipline

I acknowledge receipt of your email to Ms Ceeney. We will be in touch

again, once we have been able to look in more detail at the issues you
raise.
Yours sincerely
Alison Hoyland
>Alison Hoyland I Head of Chief Executive's Office I Financial Ombudsman
Service
phone: 020 7964 0869 1 fax: 020 7964 0870 1 address: South Quay Plaza,
183 Marsh Wall, London, E14 9SR

Original Message

Sent: 20 September 2012 13:55

To: Ceeney, Natalie
Cc: Chief.Executive@financial-ombudsman.org.uk
Subject: Staff discipline
Sensitivity: Confidential
* PGP Decrypted Message
Dear Chief Executive,
I appreciate your organisation taking on my case (1094-0266) but I am
sure my experience with it is not the one you are aiming to foster.
Your service says "With fairness in mind, we generally handle the oldest
complaints first." I am writing about how I have been treated by your
staff.
I made a complaint about service for Julian Jarrett's manager on
23/08/12 and was told to wait until 20/09/12 for a response from Steve
Thomas (20 business days).
In case 1122-3773, the complainant had twice as many grumbles about
service when it was sent to Steve Thomas on 03/09/12 and received a
reply 2 days latter with a subsequent further response a week after
that. I have had to wait 4 weeks for a response I got yesterday.
I appears that neither Steve Thomas or his PA(s) can give consistent
service.
To be treated fairly as per the complaints about your service, these

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should be addressed in the order they are received. I find this

manipulation extremely disrespectful and obviously requires addressing
through your disciplinary procedures internally. I should not be the one
to suffer if you cannot supervise and manage your staff adequately or
are unwilling to fix patterns of unethical behaviour.
I believe that the independent assessor is available for the last part
of complaints about your service but with respect, she do not run your
firm and wouldn't be right for her to demand that P45's should be issued
and does not advise on service restructuring.
I would appreciate it if you could deal with this personally.
Yours,
******************************
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those of the Financial Ombudsman Service Ltd.
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E14 9SR, United Kingdom. Registered as a limited company in England and Wales No. 3725015. Registered office
as above.
******************************

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From: "Hurley, Patrick" <patrick.hurley@financial-ombudsman.org.uk >

To:
Date: 09/28/2012 6:01 PM
Subject: Your complaint about our service (reference 1094-0266)

Ms Ceeney has asked that / reply to your email dated 20 September 2012 on her behalf, as head of
casework operations and Mr Thomas' manager. / would not normally reply to a complaint about our
service once one of our senior managers has replied, as the next step would normally be for you to
contact the /ndependent Assessor. However, given the nature of the concerns you have, / am replying so
that / can address your specific issues.
/ understand the points you are making about timely and orderly responses to issues raised about our
service and / can appreciate your concerns about another service complaint being dealt with more quickly
than yours. While / am unable to discuss the specifics of someone else's case with you, / would like to
address the point more generally. We do aim to deal with service complaints in the order in which they
are received. However, as you might appreciate there are a number of factors which may mean that one
service complaint may take longer than another, ranging from the specifics of the issues raised to the
management of the workload at any given time. / would like to assure you that there was no manipulation
here and our handling was in no way intended to be disrespectful to you.
While the handling times of different service complaints may vary, we have set ourselves maximum
timescales for when we aim to have responded to all service complaints by - which as our factsheet
(complaints about our service) explains is 20 working days. /deally, we would deal with all service
complaints within a matter of days but this is not always possible. /n your case, you asked for your service
complaint to be passed to the senior manager on 23 August 2012, which meant that the response was
due by 21 September 2012 (as 27 August 2012 was a bank holiday). The full response to your service
complaint was sent on 19 September 2012.
While the circumstances here do not warrant disciplinary action, / have reminded colleagues that we
should handle service complaints in an orderly fashion and that this should be a factor in their work
planning.
As you know, the /ndependent Assessor is the last stage of our process for complaints about our service.
/f you remain unhappy with the service provided (including the service provided by Mr Thomas and me)
you can contact her within three months of Mr Thomas' letter dated 19 September 2012.
As for your case against NatWest, / thought / should let you know that it has been closed as you did not
tell us that you would like an ombudsman to look at your case by 11 September 2012. /f you would like
your case to be passed to an ombudsman you will need to tell us as soon as possible. As Mrs Frayn
explained previously, we generally will not be able to reopen cases if a response is received more than
two months after the deadline, although we will of course look at each case on its own merits and the
reason for any delay.
Yours sincerely

Patrick Hurley
Head of Casework Operations

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This e-mail and any attachments are confidential and may be subject to legal privilege. /f you are not the
intended recipient, please notify the sender immediately and delete this e-mail and any attachment from
your system. /f you are not the intended recipient you must not copy, disclose or take any action in
reliance to it.
This e-mail and any attachments have been checked by virus detection software before transmission. You
should carry out your own virus checks on the contents of this communication. We accept no liability for
any loss or damage which may be caused by software viruses or by interception or interruption of this
mail.
Unless otherwise indicated, this e-mail has no contractual effect and may only be used for the purpose(s)
indicated in it. The statements and opinions expressed in this e-mail are those of the author and do not
necessarily reflect those of the Financial Ombudsman Service Ltd.
This email has originated from the Financial Ombudsman Service Ltd. South Quay Plaza, 183 Marsh Wall,
London E14 9SR, United Kingdom. Registered as a limited company in England and Wales No. 3725015.
Registered office as above.

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