Free consumer advice when a dispute with a firm stalls

When a firm has stopped answering your emails, refused a refund it owes, or simply gone quiet, you do not have to face it alone, and you do not have to pay for help. The UK has a network of free consumer advice services, and the main one for most people is the Citizens Advice consumer service. In England and Wales you can call it on 0808 223 1133, Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm, with a separate number, 0808 223 1144, if you want to speak to a Welsh-speaking adviser¹. In Scotland, consumer advice is run by Advice Direct Scotland on 0808 164 6000⁴.

These services are free and confidential. They can explain your rights, help you put a complaint together, and pass details of unfair practices to Trading Standards, which has the power to investigate traders¹. What they cannot do is take a case to court for you or force a firm to pay up. Where a firm still will not budge, the next steps are an ombudsman or an alternative dispute resolution (ADR) scheme, and this page explains when each applies, what it costs, and where your rights stop.

Citizens Advice: free, confidential help when a firm won't budge

Citizens Advice is the first port of call for most consumer problems in England and Wales, and its consumer service exists precisely for the situation where you have complained to a firm and got nowhere. It offers free, confidential advice and information across a wide range of issues⁶, and it is the route through which complaints about a business's practices reach Trading Standards¹.

The scale of the service gives a sense of how ordinary it is to use it. The consumer service handled 958,880 contacts in 2015-16 across England, Wales and Scotland¹⁰, and demand for its debt advice alone reached a record 48,482 clients in January 2024, before falling to 43,006 in June 2024¹¹. People call about faulty goods, botched services, refused refunds, aggressive sellers and confusing contracts, as well as about money problems that sit behind a dispute, such as rent, bills and arrears.

One point worth knowing early: Citizens Advice advises, it does not adjudicate. It can tell you what the law says, help you write the letter, and refer the trader for investigation, but it cannot order the firm to do anything. If you need a decision that carries weight, that comes later, from an ombudsman, an ADR scheme or a court. The Financial Ombudsman Service, which handles complaints about financial firms, is free for consumers to use: consumers, friends and families supporting them, charities and advice centres can bring cases directly to it free of charge¹². The Payment Systems Regulator likewise directs people to contact their bank first and then the Financial Ombudsman Service if they are still unhappy¹³.

What Citizens Advice can help with: debt, consumer rights, scams, benefits and more

The consumer service is best known for shopping and trader disputes, but its scope is much wider. Citizens Advice offers free advice on debt and other money problems¹⁴, and it can give you the information you need to make the right choices with your money and help you deal with urgent debts, such as mortgage arrears¹⁵. It also runs a free service for people who need help with gambling problems¹⁶.

In practice, that breadth matters because consumer disputes rarely arrive on their own. A faulty car becomes a credit problem if you bought it on finance. A refused refund becomes a debt problem if you have already paid the bill from money you needed for something else. A scam becomes a banking problem if the money left your account. Being able to talk through the whole picture with one free service, rather than being passed between bodies, is one of the main reasons people use it.

In Scotland the equivalent help comes through Citizens Advice Scotland and its partners: you can get free in-person advice at your local Citizens Advice Bureau or on the phone through the Money Talk Team⁷. In Wales, Citizens Advice Cymru offers free, confidential advice and information on a range of issues⁶. The subjects covered include consumer rights, debt, benefits, housing and scams, and the advisers can also point you towards specialist schemes, such as the Help to Claim service, which supports people making new Universal Credit claims.

How to get advice: phone, web chat, email or a local centre

The quickest route for most people is the phone. The consumer helpline in England and Wales is 0808 223 1133, and it operates Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm¹. If you would prefer to speak to a Welsh-speaking adviser, call 0808 223 1144³. In Scotland, Advice Direct Scotland takes consumer calls on 0808 164 6000⁴, and in Northern Ireland Consumerline is on 0300 123 6262⁵.

Beyond the phone, there are several other ways in:

• Online: the Citizens Advice website carries detailed guidance on consumer rights, debt, benefits and more, which you can read without speaking to anyone.
• In person: local Citizens Advice offices across England and Wales, and Citizens Advice Bureaux in Scotland, offer face-to-face appointments⁷.
• Northern Ireland: Advice NI has local advice centres with face-to-face appointments bookable via its website, and it runs a guidance line on 0800 915 4604 for people who need to be pointed to the right service, including food bank referrals¹⁷.

Before you call, it helps to have the facts of your dispute to hand: what you bought and when, what went wrong, what you have already said to the trader, and what it has replied. If you have not yet put your complaint in writing, the guide to writing an effective complaint letter or email sets out how to do it, and the page on what to do if a company hasn't replied to your complaint covers the next move when silence is the only response.

Advice in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland

Consumer advice is organised by nation, and the number you call depends on where you live. This is not a technicality: each nation has its own service, and each feeds into its own enforcement bodies.

Consumerline in Northern Ireland notes that consumers from England, Scotland and Wales should contact the relevant number at Consumer Advice on GOV.UK instead⁵, so cross-border shoppers use the service for where they live, not where the trader is. The rules on alternative dispute resolution themselves extend to England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, so the framework for escalating a complaint is UK-wide even though the advice lines are separate.

Northern Ireland also has its own consumer body, the Consumer Council, which handles complaints and support for consumers there, including on financial services and shopping safely online. The page on the Consumer Council and complaint help in Northern Ireland covers it in detail. For online shopping problems anywhere in the UK, one rule is worth remembering: your contract is with the retailer, not the delivery company, so you need to contact the retailer if something has gone wrong, though you can also complain directly to the parcel operator, especially with repeat problems¹⁸.

Citizens Advice can pass your complaint to Trading Standards

Advisers do more than explain your rights. Citizens Advice can refer your complaint to local Trading Standards officers, who may then investigate on your behalf¹. It also shares complaint information nationally with enforcement authorities, including Trading Standards, the Competition and Markets Authority and regulators, so that action can be taken against traders whose practices harm many people¹. Complaints about a business's practices are routed to Trading Standards through Citizens Advice⁹.

This is the machinery behind the advice line, and it is the reason advisers ask detailed questions about the trader. An individual complaint may feel like a dead end, but the pattern across thousands of complaints is what Trading Standards acts on. A referral does not mean your own case will be investigated, and Trading Standards decides for itself what to pursue: it is an enforcement body, not a personal claims service.

The same referral logic applies in Northern Ireland. Consumerline will forward details of any complaint to the Trading Standards Service for investigation if suitable⁵, and it can also refer complaints to the Financial Conduct Authority, which authorises lenders¹⁹. If your problem is with a claims management company rather than the firm it claimed against, the route is to complain to the FCA about the claims company's conduct²⁰.

For complaints about financial firms, the sequence is set by the rules: consumers may complain to the firm and seek redress from it, and refer the complaint to the Financial Ombudsman Service if the firm does not satisfy the complaint and it is appropriate to do so²¹. In other words, the firm gets the first chance to put things right, and the ombudsman is the escalation, not the starting point.

Scams: getting advice and reporting them

Yes, Citizens Advice can help if you have been scammed, and it is one of the better-used parts of the service. Of 5,030 reported scam cases handled by the consumer service between October and December 2015, 33% were online, 11% arrived by mail, 8% involved the doorstep and 2% came by other routes²². The picture those figures paint is still recognisable: scams reach people through every channel they use, and the online route dominates.

Advisers can talk you through what happened, what your bank may be able to do, and how to report the scam so it is recorded and passed on. Because complaint information is shared with enforcement authorities nationally¹, a scam report to the consumer service is not just a private conversation: it feeds the intelligence that Trading Standards and regulators act on. For the wider picture of how fraud works and what protections exist, see the guide to scams and fraud, and for nuisance calls and unwanted marketing, the guide to stopping unwanted calls, texts and marketing explains the reporting routes for that specific problem⁹.

Taking a stalled retail dispute to an ADR scheme

When a trader has given you a final answer you do not accept, or no answer at all, the next question is whether an alternative dispute resolution scheme can take the case. ADR is a way of having a complaint looked at by a third party without going to court, and the government's aim has been to make it widely available as a cheaper and quicker alternative to the courts, with consumers signposted to an appropriate scheme²³.

The rules set a clear sequence. Consumers who have a complaint and wish to obtain redress must, as a first step, use the trader's own internal complaints procedure²³. Only when that has failed does ADR come into play. The conditions for escalation are consistent across schemes: a complaint becomes eligible where it has not been resolved after eight weeks, there has been no meaningful engagement with the complaint, or the firm has not responded at all⁸. Some schemes also accept a case once the trader has issued a final written response, sometimes called a deadlock letter.

RetailADR is one of the schemes that handles retail disputes, covering disputes between consumers and retailers where the trader has agreed to use the scheme. Complaints can be brought to it by post, online or by telephone. As with other schemes, the starting conditions are that you have already complained to the retailer directly in writing, and that you have either received a final written response or given the retailer eight weeks to respond.

For consumers, the cost is fixed by law: an ADR scheme must make the alternative dispute resolution available free of charge or at a nominal fee for consumers²⁴. The scheme's operator must also meet certain minimum standards and be approved by a competent authority before it can run²³, so a genuine scheme is a vetted one, not a trader's friend offering to mediate.

Where ADR stops: traders who refuse, and financial firms

ADR has two important limits. The first is participation. Traders do not have to agree to use ADR for a consumer complaint unless it is compulsory for them by law, by trade association membership, or by their contract²³. They are, however, required to provide certain information about ADR to consumers²³, so a trader must at least tell you whether a scheme exists and whether it will take part. If the trader refuses, no scheme can force the case, and your remaining route is the court.

The second limit is subject matter. ADR is mandatory in certain regulated sectors where there is a high risk of consumer detriment, and the examples given are financial services, energy and aviation²³. For financial firms, the escalation route is not a retail ADR scheme at all but the Financial Ombudsman Service, which consumers can use free of charge¹². If your complaint is about a bank, lender, insurer or adviser regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority, you can bring it to the ombudsman, including where you feel you were given the wrong advice¹². The ombudsman's own technical support for advisers and businesses, its Business Support Hub, exists to explain how complaints are looked at, which underlines that the process is a defined one, not an informal chat¹².

A worked example of how scheme eligibility works comes from property. RICS runs an ADR arrangement for complaints about firms that are no longer RICS-regulated. To be eligible, you must be a consumer acting outside your trade, business or profession; the complaint must relate to services provided by an RICS-regulated firm at the time the work was carried out; the firm must since have ceased to be regulated; the services must have been provided in the UK; and the complaint must not already be being considered or determined elsewhere⁸. Applications go to a dedicated email address with details of the firm and the work, a description of the complaint, relevant dates, evidence of attempts to resolve the matter with the firm, and supporting documents⁸. That list is a fair template for what any ADR scheme will ask you for.

After ADR: the right to go to court

Taking part in ADR does not sign away your day in court. The schemes are designed as a cheaper and quicker alternative to litigation²³, not a replacement for it. If the scheme makes a decision you are unhappy with, or if no scheme is available because the trader refuses to take part, court action remains the final route, and the Welsh Trading Standards advice on thinking of suing in court is one of the guides that walks consumers through that decision⁴.

Before going anywhere near a claim form, two things are worth doing. First, make sure the trader's own complaints procedure has been exhausted, because that is the required first step for redress²³, and a court will expect to see that you tried. Second, get advice on the strength of your case and what it will cost: the consumer helpline can talk you through the position¹, and the guide to writing an effective complaint letter or email helps you build the paper trail. Where the dispute is with a financial firm, the ombudsman is free¹² and binding on the firm if you accept its decision, so the court is rarely the right first escalation there.