HomeOwners Alliance response to Call for Evidence on the New Home Ombudsman Enquiry

Continuation – !4 goes up, so does their income. When PPI complaints were at their peak, the income from the case fees allowed the FOS to hire 4,000 more staff • ensures the ombudsman is independent, insulating it from both government budget cuts and industry financial pressure • consumers are not financially penalised for making complaints. Imposing fees on consumers for making complaints – such as the £120 charged by the Consumer Code for Home Builders – should be banned To ensure that small – as well as consumer-friendly – businesses do not suffer unfairly from vexatious complainants, the FOS does not charge a case handling fee for the first 25 complaints against a company each year. Given the smaller scale of the property industry compared to the financial services industry, this should perhaps be reduced to 10, but there is a strong case for a threshold. There also needs to a be a simple triage process to filter out serial and vexatious complainants, where an early decision is made by the ombudsman not to hear a case and so no handling fee is charged. We fully support your objective of increasing consumer protection for buyers of new homes. But the best way to do that is to have a stronger ombudsman with a wider remit, rather than more ombudsmen. Yours sincerely Paula Higgins