Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein)
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302. To ask the Minister for Finance the number of tracker mortgage cases currently before the Financial Services and Pensions Ombudsman, disaggregated by complaint stage, investigation, preliminary decision, final decision and appeal by respondent; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [52011/22]

Paschal Donohoe (Dublin Central, Fine Gael)
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The Financial Services and Pensions Ombudsman (FSPO) has advised that as at 14 October 2022, its office had 1,077 complaints on hand identified as being tracker mortgage interest rate related complaints. In 2022 to date, the FSPO has identified 113 new complaints as being tracker mortgage interest rate related; closed 172 tracker mortgage interest rate related complaints and re-opened 11 such complaints.

Tracker mortgage interest complaints will continue to account for a substantial proportion of the work of the FSPO, for some time to come, because in most tracker mortgage complaints, the respondent financial service providers continue to confirm that the complaints meet the time limit eligibility prescribed by section 51 of the governing legislation.

Of the 1,077 tracker mortgage interest rate complaints on hand, 104 complaints have been placed on hold. This can be for a number of reasons including where (i) the complaint may be impacted by the outcome of an ongoing statutory appeal or judicial review which arises in a similar matter, (ii) no action is appropriate pending the outcome of the Tracker mortgage Examination Independent Appeals Panel process, (iii) the outcome of external legal proceedings is awaited, or (iv) the hold is at the Complainant’s request for personal reasons.

Of the remaining 973 active tracker mortgage complaints on hand, the detail of their status is listed in the table below:

As of 14 October 2022, there were 302 legally binding decisions relating to tracker mortgage complaints available on the FSPO’s Database of Decisions. Of these decisions 11 complaints were upheld; 12 were substantially upheld; 26 were partially upheld; and 253 were not upheld.

At the time of publication of the Digest of Tracker Mortgage Interest Rate Complaints in February 2020, the FSPO noted that it is likely that it will continue to be the case that a large number of complaints relating to tracker interest rates on mortgage loans will not be upheld, because for a person to have an entitlement to a particular tracker interest rate, there must be some contractual or other obligation on their bank entitling them to such a rate.

The FSPO has advised me that the data contained in this response is extracted from a live database and therefore depicts complaint information at a specific moment in time. Data in this database is subject to ongoing verification and data categorisation as the understanding of the specific complaint is developed.