Complaining about the FCA, PRA or Bank of England

Most people who are unhappy with a bank, insurer or lender complain to the firm and then to the Financial Ombudsman Service. But sometimes the complaint is about the regulators themselves: the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) or the Bank of England. For that, there is a separate route called the Complaints Scheme, and beyond it an independent Complaints Commissioner who can review the outcome.

The Complaints Scheme is used jointly by the FCA, PRA and Bank of England, so one scheme covers all three bodies¹. It exists because the law requires the regulators to investigate complaints made against them: the FCA has described the scheme as in essence the one that has been in place for about 20 years, since the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 was passed². The current version of the Scheme dates from November 2023, and complaints made before 31 October 2023 are considered under the previous March 2016 version¹.

The Scheme has real limits. A regulator cannot consider complaints about the firms it regulates¹, and the FCA cannot pay compensation in the way a court or the Ombudsman can order a firm to pay³. What the Scheme can lead to is an apology, an explanation, a change in how the regulator works, and in some cases a compensatory payment where the regulator was the primary cause of a loss².

What the Complaints Scheme is and who it covers

The Complaints Scheme is the formal process for complaining about the conduct of the regulators themselves. It is used jointly by the FCA, PRA and the Bank of England, which means a complaint about any of the three bodies is handled under the same arrangements, by whichever body the complaint is about¹. The PRA is the Bank of England's prudential regulator, responsible for rules on deposits and insurance, while the FCA is responsible for rules relating to other activities⁴; the two also supervise credit unions jointly in Great Britain and Northern Ireland⁵.

The Scheme's roots are statutory. The FCA has described the current arrangements as in essence the scheme that has been in place for about 20 years, since the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 was passed². That Act is what obliges the regulators to investigate complaints against them, and the Scheme is how they do it. The version in force now was published in November 2023, following a revision process in which the FCA, alongside the PRA and the Bank, set out the final changes to the Scheme¹.

The Scheme is not a route to challenge a regulator's policy decisions or to seek redress for a loss caused by a firm. It deals with conduct: how the regulator handled a matter, how it communicated, whether it followed its own processes, and whether delays or failures caused harm. The scale of such complaints can be significant. In the context of London Capital & Finance (LCF), the Treasury Committee recorded that as of 19 March 2021 the FCA had received 1,062 complaints in relation to its handling of LCF, and 57 new complaints following the publication of Dame Elizabeth Gloster's Report².

Who can complain about the FCA, PRA or Bank of England

You do not need to be a customer of a particular financial firm to complain about a regulator. The Scheme is aimed at anyone who has been affected by the conduct of the FCA, PRA or Bank of England, whether that conduct touched them directly, through a firm's failure the regulator oversaw, or through the regulator's own handling of a matter that concerned them. What matters is what the complaint is about, not your relationship with any firm.

A few practical points help in working out whether the Scheme is the right route:

• The complaint must be about the regulator's own conduct, not about a firm the regulator supervises¹.
• The FCA regulates claims management companies, so if you are unhappy with the conduct of a claims company you complain to the FCA about that company, which is a complaint about a firm rather than about the regulator³.
• You can check whether a provider or adviser is authorised by the PRA or FCA on the FCA register, which helps establish which body a complaint concerns⁶.
• It is possible to make complaints to different organisations simultaneously, so a complaint about a firm and a complaint about a regulator can run in parallel¹.

The Scheme also sits alongside other complaint routes that exist for the regulators' related bodies. The Financial Ombudsman Service handles complaints from UK-based customers of firms, including customers of EEA firms operating in the UK under the temporary permissions regime, whether or not the firm has a UK branch⁷. The FSCS has its own complaints process, with an investigation that is independent of the team responsible for your claim⁸. Those routes are separate from the Complaints Scheme and are explained further below.

What you cannot complain about under the Scheme

The Scheme sets out clear exclusions. Complaints that cannot be considered under it include¹:

• Complaints about the regulators' rules or guidance.
• Complaints about firms the regulators regulate.
• Complaints about the actions or inactions of the Financial Ombudsman Service, the Financial Services Compensation Scheme or MoneyHelper.

The first exclusion is the one that catches most people out. A complaint that the FCA's rules are wrong, or that its guidance produced an unfair outcome, is a complaint about policy, not conduct, and the Scheme cannot reconsider it. The FCA consulted in 2014 on widening the definition of a complaint and confirmed it did not propose to take forward that widening⁹, so the boundary has stayed in place.

The second and third exclusions reflect the division of responsibility across the system. A firm's conduct is for the firm and, if unresolved, the Financial Ombudsman Service. The Ombudsman, the FSCS and MoneyHelper are separate bodies with their own governance and their own complaint arrangements, so dissatisfaction with how they acted is not a matter for the regulators' Scheme.

Complaints about a firm go to the firm and the Ombudsman, not the regulator

The most common mistake is taking a complaint about a bank, lender or insurer to the FCA. A regulator cannot consider complaints about the firms it regulates¹. The FCA's role in a dispute with a firm is supervisory, not adjudicatory: it sets the rules firms must follow and can act against firms that break them, but it does not decide your individual complaint or order the firm to pay you.

The correct sequence is set out in the FCA's own rules and guidance. Consumers may choose to complain to the firm and to 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 so¹⁰. All FCA-regulated firms must have complaints-handling processes and follow the rules on responding promptly and fairly, and firms must send the FCA data twice a year on the number of complaints they receive⁹. That data feeds the published complaints figures, which you can read about in complaints data.

Before complaining to the Ombudsman, you can check the firm is regulated using the FCA's Firm Checker¹¹. If the firm you want to complain about is not on the FCA Register, the complaint may need to go to the Pensions Ombudsman instead, depending on the type of firm¹¹. If a firm is not authorised or registered with the right permissions, you will not have access to the Financial Services Compensation Scheme or the Financial Ombudsman Service, which is why checking the register matters before you rely on either protection¹².

The FCA does have powers to secure redress in some situations, but they work through the firms, not through individual complaints. It can use its powers under section 404 of the Act to make rules requiring authorised persons, electronic money issuers and payment service providers to establish and operate consumer redress schemes¹⁰, and it can apply to court for restitution where an unfair term also amounts to a rule breach causing loss to consumers¹⁰. Its wider toolkit includes statutory powers against individual firms, the power to order an industry-wide consumer redress scheme, and voluntary schemes¹³. The comparison of FSCS or Financial Ombudsman explains how those two bodies divide the work between them.

How to make a complaint to the regulators

A complaint under the Scheme starts with the regulator concerned. The process is straightforward in outline: identify what the regulator did or failed to do, check that it is not one of the excluded categories, and send the complaint to the body responsible. The FCA publishes the Scheme and its complaint arrangements on its website, and the same Scheme applies to the PRA and the Bank of England¹.

A few points from the wider complaints landscape show how the regulators' handling of complaints interacts with other processes:

• Where the FCA judges that immediate pausing of a complaint handling process is in the interests of affected consumers and firms, the government has proposed that the FCA will be exempt from the usual obligation to consult before making rules to pause complaint handling at the Financial Ombudsman Service¹⁵. This arose from the motor finance commission issue, where the FCA introduced temporary complaint-handling rules for certain car finance complaints while it reviewed the market¹⁶.
• Under those temporary rules, a respondent must direct the complainant to the information published at fca.org.uk/car-finance-complaints, which explains the reason for the pause¹⁷.
• The Financial Ombudsman has told consumers with motor finance commission complaints to wait until they hear from their lender before bringing a complaint to it¹⁸.

Those examples concern complaints about firms. They show, though, how the regulators' decisions about complaint handling can themselves become the subject of scrutiny, and the Scheme is the route for challenging how a regulator handled such a matter.

It is also possible to make complaints to different organisations simultaneously¹. So if you have a complaint about a firm's conduct and a separate complaint about how the FCA dealt with your reports about that firm, both can be pursued at the same time, each through its own route.

What a complaint can lead to, including compensatory payments

A complaint under the Scheme can produce several outcomes. The regulator may acknowledge a failure, explain what happened, apologise, and change its processes so the same failure does not recur. Where the complaint reveals a serious problem, it can contribute to wider action: the Treasury Committee, for example, expected the FCA to provide an update on its resolution of LCF complaints by 30 September 2021².

Compensatory payments are possible but limited. The FCA has stated:

Two things follow from that. First, a payment requires the regulator to be the primary cause of the loss, not merely one contributing factor. Second, even where a payment is made, it is not designed to make good the whole loss in the way a court award or an Ombudsman money award against a firm might. The Financial Ombudsman Service can decide on an appropriate remedy, including a money award up to a limit set by the FCA, or a direction to the firm¹⁵; the Complaints Scheme against the regulators works differently.

It is worth being clear about what the FCA cannot do. The FCA cannot pay compensation or order a claims management company to compensate you, even if you have received poor service³. Its redress powers operate on firms: rules and guidance on complaints, statutory powers against individual firms including Consumer Rights Act unfair terms and FSMA restitution orders, the power to order an industry-wide consumer redress scheme, and voluntary schemes¹³. Where the FCA has set up a redress scheme, as with the motor finance compensation scheme launched to compensate eligible car finance customers who may have been treated unfairly¹⁹, consumers can choose not to take part and instead go to court, where they may get more compensation²⁰, and people who disagree with their firm's decision can ask the Financial Ombudsman to assess whether the scheme rules have been followed²⁰.

Taking it further: the independent Complaints Commissioner

If you are unhappy with how the regulator dealt with your complaint under the Scheme, the next step is the independent Complaints Commissioner. The Commissioner reviews complaints about the regulators after they have responded, providing a layer of scrutiny that sits outside the regulator's own complaints team. This mirrors the pattern seen in other public bodies: the FSCS, for example, runs a complaints process in which you can escalate your complaint to its independent investigator if you are still unhappy about claim handling or service, though not the decision outcome, and that investigation is independent of the team responsible for your claim⁸.

The escalation model is a familiar one across public services. The Independent Case Examiner for the Department for Work and Pensions initially attempts to broker a solution between the complainant and the department, without having to request evidence, in a stage known as "resolution"; if unresolved, cases await allocation to an Investigation Case Manager and may be settled or receive a report detailing findings and recommendations for redress²¹. Customers who are dissatisfied with the outcome of an ICE investigation or the service provided by the ICE Office can ask a Member of Parliament to escalate complaints to the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman's Office²². The scale of such work is visible in the figures: the ICE received 4,903 complaints between 1 April 2021 and 31 March 2022²².

The Complaints Commissioner performs the equivalent role for the financial regulators. The Commissioner's review is the end of the road for a complaint under the Scheme, so it is worth exhausting the regulator's own process first, since the Commissioner reviews how the complaint was handled rather than reopening the underlying matter from scratch.

Payments for non-financial loss

The Complaints Scheme provides for payments for non-financial loss as well as compensatory payments for financial loss. The FCA has committed to review the non-financial loss levels in the Complaints Scheme every 2 years to ensure they remain appropriate¹. A review of the Scheme's payments for non-financial loss was completed in August 2026, with the FCA concluding that the current levels remain appropriate.

Non-financial loss covers distress, inconvenience and the time spent pursuing a matter, rather than money lost. The two-yearly review commitment matters because it is the mechanism by which the payment levels are meant to keep pace with circumstances; without it, the amounts would simply stay fixed regardless of how the Scheme operates in practice.

The distinction between financial and non-financial loss runs through the wider redress system. The Financial Ombudsman Service, when it finds in a consumer's favour on an insurance issue, may tell the firm to change the record and refund extra money, a remedy that combines correcting the outcome with putting the consumer back in the position they should have been in²³. The Complaints Scheme's payments for non-financial loss serve the narrower purpose of recognising the impact of the regulator's own handling, and the FCA's position is that compensatory payments for financial loss would not attempt to reflect the totality of the loss suffered².

Which version of the Scheme applies to your complaint

The version of the Scheme that applies depends on when your complaint was made. Complaints made to the FCA before 31 October 2023 are considered under the Complaints Scheme of March 2016, while complaints made from 1 November 2023 onwards are considered under the revised Scheme dated November 2023¹. The revision came about through a policy statement in which the FCA, alongside the PRA and the Bank, set out the final changes to the Complaints Scheme, and the revised Scheme came into force for new complaints made from 1 November 2023.

If you are preparing a complaint now, the November 2023 version is the one that will apply. If you complained some years ago and are returning to the matter, the March 2016 version governs how that complaint is assessed, which matters because the exclusions, payment levels and process details differ between versions.

Other complaint processes in the financial system use the same version-based approach. The Financial Assistance Scheme, for example, acknowledges receipt of a complaint straight away, works to a 10 working day response time at stage 1, allows a stage 2 complaint within 28 days of the stage 1 response, reviewed by a member of its Senior Resolutions Panel with a 28 day response time, and requires escalation to the next stage within two months of the stage 2 response being issued²⁴. The Pensions Ombudsman notes that complaints about the Pension Protection Fund or the Financial Assistance Scheme have different rules about what it can look into and decide²⁵. These are separate processes, but they show how complaint rights are always tied to a specific scheme version and its own deadlines.

Other routes that sit alongside the Scheme

The Complaints Scheme is not the only avenue when something in the financial system has gone wrong, and several other routes may be more appropriate depending on what the complaint is about.

Complaints about a firm. Complain to the firm first, then the Financial Ombudsman Service if the firm does not resolve the matter¹⁰. Check the firm is regulated first using the FCA's Firm Checker¹¹. The comparison of the Financial Ombudsman or court explains how those two routes differ.

Complaints about the FSCS. The FSCS has its own complaints process, with an investigation independent of the team responsible for your claim, and escalation to its independent investigator if you remain unhappy about claim handling or service, though not the decision outcome⁸. FSCS is free to customers, and it will never ask you to send money²⁶. The FSCS pays compensation if your financial services provider fails and cannot pay back your money itself⁶, and it only covers financial services firms authorised by the FCA or PRA to do business in the UK²⁷.

Complaints about data handling. If your complaint concerns how an organisation has handled your personal information, the Information Commissioner's Office is the relevant body. You can make a complaint to it online, in your own time²⁸, and it asks people to use its complaint form as it prompts them to provide the information needed²⁸. Organisations can also complain to the ICO if they disagree with the outcome of a complaint²⁸.

Complaints about advice and other public bodies. For complaints about individual voluntary arrangements, you can refer the matter to the regulator through the Insolvency Service, or to the FCA if the complaint is about advice from an FCA authorised firm²⁹. In Northern Ireland, Consumerline can refer your complaint to the Trading Standards Service for investigation or to the FCA, which authorises lenders³⁰. For pension transfer complaints, the FCA's advice checker can help you find out more about whether the advice received was right³¹.

Complaints about the Ombudsman itself. The Financial Ombudsman Service continues to deal with non-ADR complaints under the FCA's DISP rules³², and the government has consulted on changes to how the Ombudsman works, including a proposed mechanism under which one or more parties to a complaint will be able to make a request to the FOS for a view to be sought from the FCA, with the FOS deciding whether to approve such requests³³. Complaints about the Ombudsman's actions are excluded from the regulators' Complaints Scheme¹, so they follow the Ombudsman's own arrangements.

Where a matter concerns which regulator is responsible for what, the guide to who regulates what sets out the division between the FCA, PRA and other bodies, and the guide to what the FCA covers explains the boundary between regulated and unregulated activity. For the wider picture of your rights when things go wrong, see consumer protection in UK financial services.