It’s official! We have super-complainant status for the FCA and PSR

Many of us have been told before to avoid making a fuss. ‘Keep your head down’. Don’t whine or nag or carp on. Don’t be ‘that person’. 

But when it’s done carefully, rigorously and for the right reasons, complaining can be powerful.

The ability to submit a super-complaint is a formal power held by a small number of consumer organisations. It allows them to raise serious concerns about market-wide consumer harms directly with a regulator, which is then legally required to respond within 90 days.

Money and Mental Health was awarded this status last year for the Competition and Markets Authority by the Department for Business and Trade.

And now we’re delighted to share that we are being awarded the same status by the Treasury for the Financial Conduct Authority and the Payment Systems Regulator (which regulate financial services and payments systems respectively).

In practical terms, this means we can formally highlight and challenge harmful practices across banking, credit, insurance, pensions and payment systems, and regulators have to respond.

Having this status across these three regulators gives us more power to ensure urgent or overlooked harms are moved up the agenda.

It also means that Money and Mental Health is one of only four organisations to hold this status across all three regulators – the CMA, FCA and PSR. (The other three are Which?, Citizens Advice and the Consumer Council for Northern Ireland.)

This is both a great vote of confidence in our work – but also a fantastic opportunity to ensure that the voices of our Research Community are heard at the highest level.

When a super-complaint is submitted, the regulator must publish a response within 90 days. That response can lead to a formal investigation, enforcement action or recommendations for legislative change.

This is not a letter quietly filed away in a drawer. It demands attention – and a response. It’s a great cord to be able to pull in pursuit of higher standards and better outcomes for consumers.

The legal instrument granting us this status was introduced on 12 February. And, as of today, 17 March, that has now formally come into force.

As our Chief Executive Helen wrote last year, we’ve been scoping out which issues we might work into a super-complaint.

Sometimes the right complaint, made in the right way, is exactly what’s needed to drive change.

Watch this space for what comes next. You can stay in touch with our work by signing up to our newsletter – and if you have experience of mental health problems, or of caring for someone who does, then please consider joining our Research Community.