Please ask the Independent Assessor to explain why she ignore the fact that the finance director of the insurance company relied on the invalid 'commercial judgement' defence?

Waiting for an internal review by Financial Ombudsman Service Limited of their handling of this request.

scrupulous Landlord

Dear Financial Ombudsman Service Limited,
Please ask the Independent Assessor to explain why she ignore the fact that the inance director of the insurance company relied on the invalid 'commercial judgement' defence?

Further to my last annotation, I will be following up with a email listing all of my FOIA requests so there can be no doubt that the person making these WDTK requests is the 'real me'.

The finance directors' letter is on pages 105 and 106 of the 310 page PDF document she stated she based her report on.

I consider the FOS Investigator was less than honest when she denied she had any background information about the content of this letter because other records show she was in possession of a copy of the disputed insurance policy and the defective legal opinion which referred to the out of date 'commercial judgement' objection.

Yours faithfully,

scrupulous Landlord

scrupulous Landlord

Dear Financial Ombudsman Service Limited,

This is a request for a review of this FOIA Request which is now past the 20 day deadline and after I reported your failure to respond to my first FOIA request raised in the WDTK website to the Information Commissioners Office on 8 November 2019.

The FOS is required to respond by law, not what the FOS considers to be the 'spirit of the Freedom of Information Act'. You may group your response with other requests I have made, if you justify the logic of your classification of response to the WDTK requests you have grouped together.

Because the function of the Independent Assessor, rather than the individual, is responsible for the self regulation of the FOS, all of my WDTK FOI requests are relevant but I suggest the following requests could be dealt with by a single response from the FOS.

I stress that an FOIA request should be about the performance of the organisation, not an individual, and I support the right of privacy for people working for public authorities but there is only one FOS IA in the world and she is identified in the FOS IA website. The current incumbent is a solicitor regulated by the Solicitors Regulation Authority as published in the Law Society website as shown below.

https://solicitors.lawsociety.org.uk/per...

She is a non-practicing solicitor and her areas of expertise are listed as 'Crime-General', 'Education' and 'Human Rights'.

This means that she should be competent to assess issues relating to fraud and she can claim competence in insurance issues through her personal professional development of working for the FOS supported by the FOS' information systems. She may have been an ombudsman previously but she is no longer listed as such but that may be justified on the basis that the FOS want to demonstrate there is a 'firewall' between the investigation branch and the FOS IA function.

I registered with the WDTK website so I could review and annotate records that were relevant to my case and I raised my first FOIA request as a way of verifying my identity and assumption that my case is/was 'exceptional'. This is the request I have referred to the Information Commissioners Office (“ICO”).

Based on the content of her report about my case, I assume she does not hold a relevant Lead Assessor qualification.

https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/w...

Staring each point that will be considered with the phrase “You complain...” may be considered frivolousness but I consider this to be an example of conscious bias.

https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/d...

It may be co-incidence that another WDTK requester claimed that there are over 700 references to the out dated 'commercial judgement' objection since 2017 which was used by the Finance Director of the insurance company in my case when he wrote to me in April 2017 so I raised the FOIA request below to confirm or deny that estimate.

https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/w...

It could be argued that the response given by the FOS to my FOIA request is a valid refusal notice but my counter argument is that the public interest test should prevail.
https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/p...

My assumption that Richard Thompson, the Director of Quality of the FOS, does not hold a Lead Assessor qualification is based on the same basis that it take one to know one. He may have been justified in delegating the handling of my complaint to the Ombudsman's manager but the FOS IA was misguided in stating that this delegation was evidence of compliance with the requirement for a review to be conducted by a 'senior manager'

https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/p...

Similar arguments apply to my request regarding the qualifications of your Data Protection Officer. She was identified as a 'senior manager' in earlier annual reports but she was listed under the finance team, not as an ombudsman.

https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/w...

As far as I am concerned, the FOS are offering financial service providers the modern equivalent of selling selling indulgences. The Finance Director offer a very qualified apology rather than admitting that I had a third party right to make a claim.

https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/p...

My next request is another way of asking the same question above and it is an example of poor decision making based on a lack of expertise which may be understandable when it is made by a person with a Level 3 NVQ in Customer service. My serous purpose is not that I want to criticise a person who lacked adequate training and was under pressure to resolve 4.5 cases per week, my concern is that it has proven to be impossible to get some simple, but very significant, errors corrected.
https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/h...

The Finance Director appeared to be quoting directly from the defective legal opinion but, as an Accountant and the Finance director of an insurance company, he is should have known better when he quoted the out of date 'commercial judgement' defence and the spurious objection that processing a claim where two policies from the same company is in place would cause difficulties. This is called 'duel insurance'.

Contrary to what their underwriters stated, I have obtained 'double insurance' where there are two insurance companies involved. In either case of 'duel' or 'double' insurance, a loss adjuster would be appointed for a complex claim. The acceptance of the replies given by the Finance Director by the FOS are clear examples of bias in favour of the business.

https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/p...

I offered the compromise of taking out a second policy in good faith and I conditionally accepted the investigator's suggestion of focusing on that issue on the basis that my offer was reasonable so as far as I am concerned. The FOS IA's support of the Investigator's opinion is the third example of this bias in favour of the business.

https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/h...

As objective evidence of how badly informed the FOS personnel were, the second insurance company had now qualms about the the double insurance issue or supplying copies of the building insurance policy on demand when I took out the policy two years ago and when I renewed the policy last week. Not only have the FOS shown bias against me, they have shown bias against other, more ethical, insurance providers.

https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/p...

I had already contacted Action Fraud BEFORE I contacted the FOS so referring me back to Action Fraud would have been ineffective, unethical and possibly unlawful.
https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/d...

I acknowledge that the FOS may be justified in refusing some of my requests. If so please issue me with a formal refusal notice as defined in FOIA s17 and the supporting ICO guidelines.

Yours faithfully,

scrupulous Landlord

scrupulous Landlord

Dear Financial Ombudsman Service Limited,

Please pass this on to the person who conducts Freedom of Information reviews.

I am writing to request an internal review of Financial Ombudsman Service Limited's handling of my FOI request 'Please ask the Independent Assessor to explain why she ignore the fact that the finance director of the insurance company relied on the invalid 'commercial judgement' defence?'.

Further to FOI 3743-3774, I deny you can rely on s21 or s12 FOI for rejecting this request under Section 14 of the Freedom of Information Act, here are the links to the relevant guidelines.

Section 12 -cost of compliance
https://ico.org.uk/media/for-organisatio...
https://ico.org.uk/media/for-organisatio...

Section 14 – vexatious requests
https://ico.org.uk/media/for-organisatio...

Section 21 -Information available elsewhere
https://ico.org.uk/media/for-organisatio...

I consider that the FOS description of the impact of the Alternative Dispute Regulation gives a false impression of the significance of that legislation which remove several grounds that the business could rely on when dismissing a complaint.

https://www.financial-ombudsman.org.uk/w...

So there can be no confusion, if you click on “the rules” link it will take you to the DISP rulebook. If you scroll down to “Grounds for dismissal” rule 3.4.4 states:

“The Ombudsman may dismiss a complaintreferred to the Financial Ombudsman Service before 9 July 2015 without considering its merits if the Ombudsmanconsiders that:”

Rule 3.4.4 (11) specifically states:

“it is a complaint about the legitimate exercise of a respondent's commercial judgment; or”

So my question remains valid and significant, why was the insurance company allowed to rely on their commercial interest in dismissing my complaint in 2017?

A full history of my FOI request and all correspondence is available on the Internet at this address: https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/p...

Yours faithfully,

scrupulous Landlord

scrupulous Landlord

Dear Financial Ombudsman Service Limited,

Please pass this on to the person who conducts Freedom of Information reviews.

I am writing to request an internal review of Financial Ombudsman Service Limited's handling of my FOI request 'Please ask the Independent Assessor to explain why she ignore the fact that the finance director of the insurance company relied on the invalid 'commercial judgement' defence?'.

Further to the request for a review of my request below, I confirm that I believe I would have had strong grounds for for getting the Final Decision in my case overturned based on this issue alone.

https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/w...

There are specific issues in my case that cannot be discussed in this public forum but the explanation by the FOS goes beyond what insurance companies specify so I suggest that a significant number of other cases where the Final Decision specifies the 'commercial judgement ' was specified are also unsound.

I may be a boring old fool ("BOF") but I was presented with offers I had to refuse by the Investigator and the Ombudsman so I boringly persisted and eventual got lucky and dealt with a customer services representative of an insurance broker who was better informed than the so called 'experts' in the FOS and most of the lawyers I dealt with.

It is a common misconception that it is fraudulent to hold two policies on one building, something which is called 'double insurance', but that is not true. This is what I eventually achieved despite the FOS's best efforts to thwart me and it is one of the many strategic and operational failures of the FOS that they have not dispelled this 'double insurance' myth.

The defence that the Information Rights team relies upon that it is too difficult to identify how many times the 'commercial judgement' phrase has been used shows a woeful lack of understanding of the search capabilities of software retrieval tool. The computer says no objection is fundamentally dishonest when applied to the Final Decisions which are published in the public domain. It is a commercial decision made by the FOS to restrict the search criteria available to the public, it is not a technical constraint. I know this because it is the sort of boring thing I used to do before I got too old for such 'excitement'.

I would recommend that anyone who believes they have grounds to appeal to the High Court on this basis should consult a lawyer. However, I can probably provide other case law examples or references to other rules and regulations in response to specific questions that may be raised as annotations to any of my WDTK records.

This is one of several similar requests that could be grouped together and I might rephrase them all as a single serious purpose question which is:

Please reconcile your justification for still allowing the 'commercial judgement' by insurance companies to refuse to honour claims on insurance policies in light of the the duty of fair presentation defined in the Insurance Act 2015.

http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2015...

A full history of my FOI request and all correspondence is available on the Internet at this address: https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/p...

Yours faithfully,

scrupulous Landlord

scrupulous Landlord

Dear Financial Ombudsman Service Limited,

The justification given by the FOS for allowing business to rely on a rule that was withdrawn in 2015 is very weak.

It is self evident that almost any complain is against the commercial interests of the company.

When you compare what section 43 FOIA has to say which is concerned with trade secrets, the position presented by the FOS is absurd.

http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000...

Yours faithfully,

scrupulous Landlord

scrupulous Landlord

Dear Financial Ombudsman Service Limited,

The difference between this request and the similar request regarding Ombudsman decisions is a corporate governance issue which is independent of the powers allocated to ombudsmen to conduct investigations but the same common law principles apply.

Yours faithfully,

scrupulous Landlord

scrupulous Landlord

Dear Financial Ombudsman Service Limited,

Please pass this on to the person who conducts Freedom of Information reviews.

I am writing to request an internal review of Financial Ombudsman Service Limited's handling of my FOI request 'Please ask the Independent Assessor to explain why she ignore the fact that the finance director of the insurance company relied on the invalid 'commercial judgement' defence?'.

I confirm that I consider that this request is valid and is sufficiently different to justify a separate review but the basic arguments regarding the other request for a review I made.

https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/p...

I confirm that I have contacted both the current and previous Independent Assessor (IA) and their case workers have persisted with playing "pass the parcel" which I consider to be unethical.

I further consider I have exhausted the FOS complaints process and proved beyond reasonable doubt that it is not fit for purpose . Therefore, the FOS IA function should either be given the authority to consider the merits of the case or the function can be dispensed with because it is an expensive irrelevance.

A full history of my FOI request and all correspondence is available on the Internet at this address: https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/p...

Yours faithfully,

scrupulous Landlord