The Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) has made headway in tackling its case backlog but has seen consumer satisfaction levels drop.

The Ombudsman resolved 99% of complaints older than 18 months by 31 March, marginally lower than the 100% it had targeted to resolve, according to its annual report.

During 2021/22 the FOS published an Action Plan following criticism of its performance in recent years.

Baroness Zahida Manzoor, chairman of the FOS, said: “We made good progress during the year across all five areas of the Action Plan and we achieved a number of service improvements, resolving more cases than we received and performing well against a range of other metrics.

“Our performance saw us cutting our backlog of unallocated cases by over half and making significant progress in providing answers on our oldest cases. But we recognise that our customers are still waiting too long for an answer, and the progress we have made only takes us so far.”

Consumer satisfaction with the FOS dropped for both upheld and non-upheld cases.

Consumer satisfaction for non-upheld cases dropped to 36%, in comparison to a target of 45% and 43% in 2020/21.

For upheld cases consumer satisfaction dropped 2% to 88% (2020/21: 90%). The uphold rate for the year was 39%.

Businesses’ satisfaction with the FOS rose over the same period to 80% (2020/21: 72%).

Abby Thomas, the new chief ombudsman at the FOS, said the drop in consumer satisfaction scores was due to the Ombudsman's prioritisation of older cases.

She said: "Our focus on closing the oldest cases as a priority has meant that the median time to resolve every case closed in 2021/22 was 6.4 months, above the 4.2 target we had set.

"This contributed to deteriorating consumer satisfaction scores, most significantly where we found in favour of businesses, where consumer satisfaction dropped from 43% to 36% against a target of 45%. Scores from consumers whose cases were upheld also decreased, but by a much smaller margin, from 90% to 88% against a target of 90%.

"We are disappointed to have seen any falls in our consumer satisfaction scores, but we accepted it was inevitable if we prioritised older cases as the right thing to do, regardless of the short‑term impact on performance figures."

In its 2021/22 financial year, the FOS received 165,263 complaints, lower than the 170,000 it expected.

However, the FOS resolved fewer than the 220,000 complaints it expected to see over the course of the year. It resolved 218,740 complaints.

The ombudsman has received 4,342,601 complaints since it was established in 2001, 4,274,384 of which have been resolved.

Awareness of the Ombudsman among the general public increased over the course of the year, with 91% of people having some awareness of the FOS in comparison to its target of 80% (2020/21: 90%).