Mr. William Prasifka:

No. Let me try to explain this. The goal of the office is to resolve complaints fairly and expeditiously. We try to do that. I have always believed there is no reason for us to uphold the same complaints over and over again. In this sense people often talk about an imbalance between the financial institutions and the customer. In this sense of course there is, because the provider knows from interaction with us what kinds of complaints we will uphold. Therefore, if we have a consistent message of what should be done, and the banks and insurance companies are doing this, we believe that is a very important service for us to provide.

I will give one example of how this works in practice. Last summer, as members will recall, Ulster Bank had a breakdown of its systems. Many people had no banking facilities for two weeks. They could not get money from the ATMs and their direct debits were not working. This affected up to 500,000 customers. When Ulster Bank representatives came to us, we were able to show them a printout of the banking account complaints we had upheld in the previous 18 months. We pointed out to them how we deal with such things. If missing a direct debit results in someone's insurance policy lapsing or credit rating being affected, we expect the institution to rectify expeditiously everything that has been done, reverse the direct debit, wipe out all the charges, make whatever amendments are needed to the credit record and provide some element of compensation for the aggravation and stress. They knew all this. We told them they needed to deal with their customers. They knew what our methodology would be.

Let us consider Ulster Bank's complaint record for the second half of the year. In terms of accounts, it had two complaints that were partly substantiated. The reason is as follows. While we had received complaints, our experience was that all of its complaints were dealt with in this area in a manner consistent with our previous methodologies. The only complaints that came through to us for final adjudication were ones where there was a complete mismatch between the expectation of the consumer and what we were prepared to give by way of compensation.

We then need to ask what the best way forward is. If we were not transparent in the way that we dealt with these cases and if we were not giving clear signals to the providers, they would have no ability to resolve these cases. They would not have any instructions. Therefore, yes, we would receive many more complaints and we would uphold many more complaints. However, is that better customer service? I hold the view that an important part of our job, as I said in my opening contribution, is to lift the standards throughout the industry, sending it very clear signals. Going beyond the figures, we know that since we got these powers on 1 September, the institutions have a renewed interest in what we do. They are anxious to align their methodologies with ours in a way that we had not seen previously. I regard that as a very positive development.

I believe we should keep the current system. We need to see how it works over time. We have questions over the knock-on effects, but what is very clear to us by both our experience with the providers and looking at the complaints outturn is that the effect of the additional powers we have has certainly raised the profile of complaint handling in the institutions. We think this is a very positive development.