The number of mortgage complaints received by the Financial Ombudsman Service fell by 25 per cent from 10,087 to 7,613 in the 2019/20 financial year compared to the previous 12 months.

A total of 7,067 mortgage complaints were resolved over the 2019/20 year, of which 5,410 were settled without the need for the ombudsman’s intervention and 1,647 were concluded with direction from FOS.

The total number of mortgage complaints resolved in 2019/20 was 18 per cent lower than the 8,619 cases settled in the previous year.

The proportion of mortgage complaints that were upheld in favour of the borrower was 25 per cent in the past financial year, down slightly from 26 per cent in the previous 12 months.

FOS chief executive Caroline Wayman says: “This year FOS resolved well over a quarter of a million complaints. Each one of those involved a question of fairness, and someone whose life had been disrupted because of a financial dispute.

“The fundamentals of good customer service, and good complaint handling, are constant, and the majority of financial businesses know this.

“However, some businesses still need to put fairness first in how they handle customer complaints. A key part of our work in the future will be to proactively prevent complaints, to stop unfairness arising in the first place.

“The unprecedented Covid-19 situation has already given rise to many new and complex questions of fairness when things go wrong in financial arrangements. If customers are unhappy with how a financial business has treated them, they can come to FOS for free, and we will see if we can help.”