I am a CNC programmer from Birmingham. I work shifts. I cut metal for a living.
Five years ago I made the first insurance claim of my life. Subsidence at my home. Something that should have been resolved in months.
What followed changed everything I thought I knew about how this country treats ordinary people.
Fabricated documents. Forensic metadata proving three files were manufactured within 83 minutes on a single afternoon. Created from nothing. I brought the evidence. I submitted it formally. I documented everything.
The response from the Financial Ombudsman Service? A printing error.
That is what five years of evidence, hundreds of pages, and a forensic analysis gets you.
I sent a 122-page complaint to the office of Interim Chief Ombudsman James Dipple-Johnstone personally. His office told me I had reached the end of their process. The same office that sits above the Ombudsman who had issued a binding written instruction telling me to file that exact complaint.
One organisation. Two contradictory positions. Zero accountability.
I contacted over 100 law firms. I tried no win no fee, pay by the hour, every combination possible. Silence. A quick no. Sometimes both. Even claims management companies did not bother.
I stood completely alone. I kept going anyway.
Along the way I found something unexpected. Data.
A Warwick University study published November 2024 found the real consumer uphold rate at FOS is approximately 24%. FOS publishes 37%. That gap represents hundreds of thousands of people told they had been treated fairly when they had not.
On Glassdoor, 30% of 1,446 FOS staff reviews are one star. The single largest rating category. Investigators describing rushed closures driven by weekly targets, with the evidence in the file treated as secondary.
In 2018, Channel 4 Dispatches sent a reporter undercover inside FOS. Staff admitted they did not understand the products they were ruling on. One said openly they had just "slung stuff through with any old decision." Cases were pre-rehearsed for a visiting MP to make the service look competent. Hundreds of thousands of decisions may have been wrong.
FOS responded by commissioning an independent review. The reviewer found no institutional bias. He joined the FCA board the following year. He became Interim FCA Chair in 2022. He has been reappointed twice. The man who reviewed FOS now sits at the top of the regulator overseeing it.
This is architecture.
Nobody can afford to challenge it alone. That is by design.
More -
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/day-everything-changes-artur-nadolny-q09ue/
