Fewer than 100 complaints were made against advisers regarding the most common protection and health insurance products in the last year, Health & Protection can reveal.
Data from the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) given exclusively to Health & Protection showed that protection and health insurance-related advice complaints accounted for at most 7% of all those received about intermediaries in 2021/22.
And it could be even lower as the FOS does not publish exact numbers where fewer than 10 cases have been dealt with.
Just 28 complaints were made about advisers regarding term life assurance policies, a further 24 were made about term life and critical illness (CI) cover and there were 12 complaints about income protection (IP) advice.
Fewer than 10 complaints were received for private medical or dental insurance, and term standalone CI cover, meaning the maximum number of complaints to be received for the most common health and protection insurance product sets is 82. (See table below)
Other less common advised products such as whole of life cover with or without CI (including reviewable or non-reviewable versions) all received fewer than 10 complaints, as did advised over-50s plans.
This takes the highest possible number of complaints to 127.
It was a similar trend regarding the number of complaints resolved, with just 20 term life assurance grievances cleared, 24 term life and CI cases and 16 IP cases.
All other sectors were again under 10 complaints resolved.
Uphold rates were also generally lower than for the most complained about products across the industry.
Income protection advice saw 31% of complaints upheld followed by term life and CI advice at 17% and term life only at 5%.
Advice complaints tumble
Overall, the figures were generally encouraging for the adviser community as complaints dropped by a third to 1,823 from 2,774 in 2020/21.
Out of the 2,150 complaints about advisers that were resolved over the 12 months, a third were upheld.
However, those about mis-selling and suitability of advice saw half of the 570 complaints resolved upheld in the client’s favour.
Stocks and shares ISA advice with 187 complaints and personal pensions with 182 cases were the product types with the most complaints resolved, followed by defined benefit transfers not to a SIPP (92) and standard investments (88).
Upheld rates for these ranged from 52% for the defined benefit transfers not to a SIPP to 31% for stocks and shares ISA complaints.
