Blogs · July 2026
Your commercial book is going the other way
Complaints across financial services fell by nearly a third this year. Insurance barely moved. And inside insurance, commercial is heading the wrong way.
The short answer: the Financial Ombudsman's annual data, published on 21 May 2026, shows complaints across all financial products falling from 305,726 to 214,600, nearly 30%. Insurance went from 45,529 to 45,330, a fall of 0.4%. A major reason the rest of the market fell is that the claims farms left, not that service improved. And when you split insurance by line of business, personal and commercial are going in opposite directions.
The work can leave. The accountability does not. That is our position, said first so you do not have to ask. You are the regulated firm and you stay the regulated firm. Anyone telling you an agent moves the FCA off your desk is selling you a problem.
This is a shorter, indexed version of our report of the same name, for anyone running claims or a broking business in the UK. Every figure is read from the Ombudsman's own published datasets, the FCA's own pages or the ABI's own releases, all linked at the end. Where we have totalled or compared the raw data ourselves, we say so and show which dataset we used. Where a figure did not reconcile, we say that too. There is one of those in here.
Why did everyone else's complaints fall and yours did not?
Because a category of complainant walked away from everyone else, and insurance never had many of them to lose.
Professional representatives, the claims farms, went from 50% of the Ombudsman's caseload (152,800 cases) to 18% (38,600). The referral fee changed their economics and they left. So the headline is not "financial services got better at looking after people". A large part of it is "a category of complainant stopped turning up".
Insurance did not have that cushion. Which means two things, and the second is the one that matters:
- Your volume is flat because it genuinely is flat.
- What is left is far more likely to be your own customers. A lot of the noise has come out of the number. That makes what remains closer to signal.
If you have spent two years telling your board that complaint volume is a claims-farm problem, the data changed on 21 May.
The insurance total is our own arithmetic. The Ombudsman does not publish a single insurance total, so we summed the insurance rows in its published datasets for both years. The spreadsheets are linked in Sources so you can check the sum.
And the uphold rates are not comfortable reading. Against an all-product average that fell from 34% to 30%:
| Product | Uphold rate 2025/26 |
|---|---|
| Car or motorcycle insurance | 35.4% |
| Buildings insurance | 38.0% |
| Pet insurance | 41.4% |
| Commercial vehicle insurance | 43.8% |
Every one of those is above the market. The last one is the highest, and it is the clue.
What is happening to commercial that nobody is reporting?
The trade press reports "insurance complaints" as one bucket, and the quarterly cuts that do exist are personal lines: motor, buildings, travel, pet. So we split the Ombudsman's dataset by line of business.
| 2024/25 | 2025/26 | Change | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Buildings insurance (personal) | 7,321 | 6,399 | down 12.6% |
| Commercial property insurance | 1,582 | 1,695 | up 7.1% |
| Personal motor (car or motorcycle) | 14,082 | 13,420 | down 4.7% |
| Commercial vehicle insurance | 1,423 | 1,429 | flat |
Your personal book is improving. Your commercial book is not. And when a commercial customer does complain, they win more often: commercial vehicle complaints are upheld 43.8% of the time against 35.4% for a private car, a gap of more than eight points.
Why this should bother you now. The FCA opened CP26/22, "Simplifying insurance rules", on 26 June 2026. It closes on 4 September. So the question of how commercial customers should be treated is live, in public, right now, while your commercial complaints quietly climb. As Jill Hambley, MD of UKGI Group, put it in Insurance Business UK in February: "Commercial business has essentially been pulled into a framework originally designed for consumers."
Being honest about what this does and does not prove. It shows commercial complaint volume rising while personal falls, and a persistent uphold gap. It does not prove why. We have no data on cause, and we are not going to invent a mechanism to sell you something. The pattern is real. The explanation is yours to test against your own book.
This split is our own computation from the Ombudsman's published datasets. We are not claiming to be the first to publish it: we could not check the paywalled trade titles, so the claim we make is about the data, not about us.
Our correction to one number
We previously published 45,606 insurance complaints for 2024/25. The dataset sums to 45,529. We are correcting that here rather than quietly switching it.
The components reconcile exactly, motor at 14,082 and buildings at 7,321, so the discrepancy sits in the total, most likely a different treatment of the rows the Ombudsman suppresses when a figure is under ten. We are using 45,529 and citing the dataset. If you have quoted 45,606 from us before, that is the correction.
And one more, because a Head of Claims will spot it. Our annual figures show personal motor complaints down 4.7% across 2025/26. Insurance DataLab's Q1 2026 quarterly cut shows motor complaints up almost 12% year on year, 3,519 against 3,145, reported on 2 July 2026. Both are true. The year is down; the latest quarter is up. If you are reading a turn in your own motor numbers, you are not imagining it.
What is the squeeze underneath all of it?
Two ABI figures explain the pressure everyone in a claims function is under.
- The average household claim hit £6,340 in Q1 2026, the highest on record, up 20% in a year.
- The average weather damage claim was £6,040, up 38% from £4,390, the highest first quarter on record.
- Meanwhile the average combined buildings and contents premium fell for a fourth consecutive quarter, to £375, down 5%.
Claims are getting dearer and premiums are still falling. Something gives, and it is usually the bit of the journey nobody can see: how quickly a person gets answered.
Where do the eight weeks actually go?
Under the FCA's rules you must send a final response by the end of eight weeks after receiving a complaint. For payment services it is 15 business days, or 35 in exceptional circumstances.
Nobody loses a complaint in week eight. It goes wrong in the first few days, when the customer rang and nobody picked up, and the thing that was an enquiry became a grievance.
We do not have a number for that and we are not going to pretend otherwise. No public source we could find breaks down where the eight weeks are actually spent. If a supplier shows you one, ask them for the dataset.
What can honestly be handed to an agent, and what cannot?
One agent, four ways in, all reading from the same knowledge base: voice, chat, email and social, with your policies, cover, process and thresholds feeding all four so they say the same thing.
The line we will say first, before you have to ask it. The work can leave. The accountability does not. You are the regulated firm. You remain the regulated firm. So what it actually does is narrow: it answers, on the record, in your voice, and it hands to a person the moment the thing needs judgement.
And what we will not let it do:
- It does not advise. Ever. Information about cover a customer already has is not advice. If it drifts toward advice it stops and hands over.
- It does not decide a claim. It takes the notification. A person decides.
- It does not guess. If it is not in the knowledge base it says so and passes it on.
- It does not judge vulnerability. It flags and hands to a person, quickly. That is a human's call.
- Everything is on the record, which is the part your compliance function will actually care about.
Where is an agent the wrong answer?
- If your problem is claims decisions, this is not your fix. An agent will not shorten a complex subsidence claim.
- If your complaint volume is genuinely small, the maths does not work and we would rather say so.
- If your knowledge base cannot be kept current, do not start. A confident wrong answer about cover is worse than a voicemail, and it is worse in a way the Ombudsman will read back to you.
- If you need someone accountable to the regulator, that is you, and no product changes it.
Frequently asked questions
Why did insurance complaints not fall in 2026 when everything else did?
A major reason the rest of the market fell is that professional representatives, the claims farms, went from 50% of the Ombudsman's caseload (152,800 cases) to 18% (38,600) after the referral fee changed their economics. Insurance never carried that weight of representative-driven complaints, so it had no cushion to lose. Insurance fell 0.4%, from 45,529 to 45,330, against nearly 30% across all financial products.
Are commercial insurance complaints rising?
Yes, while personal lines fall. Commercial property complaints rose 7.1% (1,582 to 1,695) while personal buildings complaints fell 12.6% (7,321 to 6,399). Commercial vehicle volume was flat (1,423 to 1,429) while personal motor fell 4.7% (14,082 to 13,420). This is our own split of the Ombudsman's published datasets, which do not publish it in that form.
Why are commercial insurance complaints rising?
We do not know, and we are not going to invent a mechanism to sell you something. The data shows commercial complaint volume rising while personal falls, and a persistent uphold gap. It does not prove why. The pattern is real. The explanation is yours to test against your own book.
Is motor going up or down?
Both, depending on the window. Our annual figures show personal motor complaints down 4.7% across 2025/26. Insurance DataLab's Q1 2026 quarterly cut shows motor complaints up almost 12% year on year, 3,519 against 3,145, reported on 2 July 2026. Both are true. The year is down; the latest quarter is up.
Where do the eight weeks to respond to a complaint actually go?
We do not have a number for that and we are not going to pretend otherwise. No public source we could find breaks down where the eight weeks are actually spent. If a supplier shows you one, ask them for the dataset. What we can say is that complaints are rarely lost in week eight; they go wrong in the first few days.
Does an AI agent reduce my FCA accountability?
No. The work can leave; the accountability does not. You are the regulated firm and you stay the regulated firm. Anyone telling you an agent moves the FCA off your desk is selling you a problem, not a product.
Sources
- Financial Ombudsman Service, annual complaints data and insight 2025/26, published 21 May 2026. All financial products 305,726 falling to 214,600, down almost 30%; uphold rate 34% to 30%; professional representatives falling from 50% of the caseload (152,800 cases) to 18% (38,600). https://www.financial-ombudsman.org.uk/businesses/resolving-complaint/our-insight/annual-complaints-data-and-insight-2025-26
- Financial Ombudsman Service, published primary datasets. Insurance complaints 45,529 (2024/25) and 45,330 (2025/26); uphold rates car or motorcycle 35.4%, buildings 38.0%, pet 41.4%, commercial vehicle 43.8%; commercial property 1,582 to 1,695; buildings 7,321 to 6,399; personal motor 14,082 to 13,420; commercial vehicle 1,423 to 1,429. These are our own totals computed from the datasets below. https://www.financial-ombudsman.org.uk/files/324633/Annual-complaints-data-2024-25.xlsx and https://www.financial-ombudsman.org.uk/files/324759/Annual-complaints-data-2025-26.xlsx
- Financial Conduct Authority, 2026. CP26/22, "Simplifying insurance rules", published 26 June 2026, closes 4 September 2026. https://www.fca.org.uk/publications/consultation-papers/cp26-22-simplifying-insurance-rules
- Insurance Business UK, 17 February 2026. "Commercial business has essentially been pulled into a framework originally designed for consumers", Jill Hambley, MD, UKGI Group.
- Insurance DataLab, reported by Insurance Business UK, 2 July 2026. Motor complaints up almost 12% year on year in Q1 2026 (3,519 against 3,145).
- Association of British Insurers, 2026. Average household claim £6,340 in Q1 2026, the highest on record, up 20% year on year; average weather damage claim £6,040, up 38% from £4,390; average combined buildings and contents premium £375, down 5% and falling for a fourth consecutive quarter. https://www.abi.org.uk/news/news-articles/2026/5/home-insurers-pay-out-846-million-to-support-households/
- FCA Handbook DISP 1.6. Final response due by the end of eight weeks; payment services 15 business days, or 35 in exceptional circumstances. https://www.handbook.fca.org.uk/handbook/DISP/1/6.html
Our own arithmetic, labelled as such. The insurance totals, the line-of-business splits and the percentage changes above are our own computations from the Ombudsman's published datasets. The Ombudsman does not publish them in that form. Both spreadsheets are linked so you can reproduce them.
Deliberately not claimed. We do not claim to be the first to publish the commercial and personal split: we could not check the paywalled trade titles, so the claim we make is about the data, not about us. We do not claim a cause for the commercial rise, because we have no data on why. We do not offer a figure for where the eight weeks are spent, because no public source exists that we could verify. And the 41% "most infuriated by not reaching a person" figure we hold elsewhere is a commissioned consumer poll, so it is deliberately absent here: this piece uses regulator and Ombudsman data only.
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