Speeches by Dean.

“How will you get them to comply quickly, if it is not in their interests to do so?”

“You think it will be in their interests to co-operate with this quickly. You are going to be taking a representative sample. How do you put safeguards in place to make sure it is going to be a representative sample? Nobody gets to look inside the FOS box. The financial firms will have full sight of all the complaints a…”

“Do you keep figures on the proportion of the people who request an ombudsman decision versus the ones who get one? Has that figure been declining?”

“Mr Dipple-Johnstone, I wonder whether I could speak to you about whether or not you think you have enough capacity at that senior ombudsman level. When people go to an ombudsman, they want an ombudsman to make a determination. We know that is not always the case. Do you think you have sufficient capacity at that end?”

“Is this staff making general use of publicly available tools or have you put investment into closed systems of your own?”

“You are using those off-the-shelf platforms. Can you reassure us about data protection issues? Clearly, if you are feeding people’s personal financial details into an open system, that has dangers to it.”

“When you were in front of us last year, you told us that staff levels should increase to 3,300 by the end of the year. I think that was at the end of last year. Did you make that figure? What is the progress looking like?”

“If the numbers remain stubbornly high and the complexity is increasing, there will be a concern about the quality of the resolutions that you are now filing. If you need to try to churn through this volume and it is complex, surely that will undermine the consideration given to each of these cases.”

“You do not have a benchmark.”

“Can I just ask a clarifying question to begin with? These thematic reviews that you talk about are distinct from the lead complaint process that might be used for mass redress events.”

“Can we move on to the case volumes that are coming through? Perhaps these questions are for you, Ms Simmonds. I was looking at the figures. For 2025-26 you were hoping to resolve 270,000 and now the forecast is that it will be about 235,000, which is not far off the figure that you did achieve in 2024-25, an incrementa…”

“You are here in front of the Treasury Select Committee. You could make a plea for more resource, if you needed it. You do not think you do; you can cope with the resources that you have.”

“Are there any further targets for next year?”

“There is a tension here because you need to deal with each complaint on its own individual merits, but the lead complaints process, almost inherently, is trying to set a precedent for other cases, is it not? How are you going to ensure that a precedent that has been set by the lead complaints process does not overrun a…”

“In terms of efficiencies, everybody is talking about how AI can assist, particularly on the administrative side. What is the FOS’s use of AI at the moment? Is it integrated fully into it, or is it something that staff are dipping their toes into? What are your plans?”

“In terms of transparency, how do we check your homework on this? How do we make sure that, once you have chosen a selection of cases and come to a determination, first, it was the right mix and, secondly, it was the right outcome?”

“Even if it is in private correspondence with this Committee, because it is a new process, it would be good to see the workings of some of your first cases that fall under this process.”

“Could you explain that in a bit more detail? When I look at the breakdown here, we have motor finance totals and non-motor finance totals. You had 10,000 budgeted and you resolved 15,000. Non-motor finance cases, it was 260,000 versus 220,000. Are you saying that the difference in that non-MFC total is that you were do…”

“I just want to distinguish between independence and impartiality, and whether it is at all possible to achieve impartiality in the analysis. Mr Jessop, you just mentioned the competition of ideas, and there are always going to be different inbuilt assumptions in the models. Professor Clift, you mentioned this in your e…”

“Could you develop that? Do you think there is not enough honesty about the values, judgments, and belief systems that are involved in economic debate? Everyone seems to counterclaim that they have more rigorous analysis, which is somehow more scientific, rather than actually being up front about what their views are fe…”