Aggregate complaints data: 2021 H2

We use our complaints data to help assess how firms interact with and treat their customers as well as monitoring their performance over time. We also use this data to guide our work in supervising firms and markets, highlighting any potential concerns with specific financial products offered.

• Key findings
• Aggregate complaints data sortable tables: 2021 H2
• Opened complaints[1]
• Closed complaints[2]
• Complaints upheld[3]
• Redress paid[4]
• About the complaints data[5]

Download the aggregate complaints data[6] (XLSX)

Key Findings

• In 2021 H2, financial services firms received 1.84m complaints, 10% lower than in 2021 H1 (2.04m). This is the lowest level recorded since 2016 H2 (figure 1).
   
• The insurance and pure protection product group saw the largest decrease in complaints received by firms: from 890,000 complaints in 2021 H1 to 770,000 complaints in 2021 H2 (11%). There was also a noticeable decrease in home finance complaints (14%), investments (29%) and decumulation and pensions (16%). No product group saw an increase from 2021 H2.
   
• Unlike in previous returns, the decrease in insurance and pure protection complaints was not driven by the drop in complaints about Payment Protection Insurance (PPI). Instead, it was consistent across all products. The exception was in warranties which has increased 18% from 44,329 to 52,091 (after also increasing 19% in 2021 H1).
   
• Current accounts are still the most complained about products. The number of complaints for these increased 5% from 503,135 in 2021 H1 to 526,609 in 2021 H2. Other general insurance is the second most complained about product, but this fell 28% from 297,650 to 216,438.
   
• As the number of PPI complaints has fallen, so too has the total number of complaints that took longer than 8 weeks to close. In 2021 H2, only 6% of complaints took this long to close, compared to 12% in 2021 H1.
   
• The total redress paid fell 52% from £559m in 2021 H1 to £291.5m. Although the majority of this can be attributed to the falling PPI complaints, the amount paid for other complaints still fell 22% from £284m in 2021 H1 to £222.2m in 2021 H2.
   
• The percentage of complaints that are upheld increased slightly from 59.4% in 2021 H1 to 59.5% in 2021 H2.

While preparing the 2024 H2 publication, we identified a discrepancy in our calculations that led to an overstatement of the total number of accounts in the ‘Banking and Credit Cards’ and ‘Investments’ product groups. This figure is used to calculate the relevant contextualisation metric in Figure 2. The updates are included in the 2024 H2 and future publications. This publication has not been updated.

Note: complaints recorded for 2016 H2 include firms whose reporting periods ended on or after 30 December 2016. These firms accounted for approximately 90% of complaints.

Complaints closed 

Firms have 8 weeks after receiving a complaint to provide a written response. 

Table 1 – Complaints closed in the period

Source: FCA complaints data

Table 2 – Complaints upheld and redress paid

Source: FCA complaints data

Aggregate complaints data sortable tables: 2021 H2

Further information about the complaints data[7]

Copyright

The data on this page is available under the terms of the Open Government Licence[8].