Complaints about PPI fall by more than half

Complaints made to the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) about payment protection insurance (PPI) have tailed off by more than half, according to new figures.

The watchdog said that it received 19,259 new consumer complaints about the issue between July and September.

This compared with 56,025 new complaints during the previous quarter, between April and June.

During the latest quarter, 92 per cent of complaints were resolved in favour of the consumer, compared with just over half (55 per cent) between April and June. The fall in PPI complaints meant that in total, the FOS received 50,645 complaints generally between July and September, a sharp drop on 81,301 in the previous quarter.

The FOS said that if PPI were taken out of the equation, complaints to it about other matters had actually gone up by nearly a quarter.

Complaints about credit card accounts, for example, have risen to 5,751, from 5,500 in the previous quarter.

New complaints about mortgages have also gone up significantly, up from 2,044 in the previous quarter to reach 2,796.