It is a Tuesday, and the letter calls itself a “final response.” That phrase is not decoration — it starts a clock: from the date printed at the top, you have six months to take the complaint to the Financial Ombudsman Service, and doing so costs you nothing.
Here is what typically happens when a bank says no. You noticed something — a payment you never made, an account frozen for a reason you can’t follow, a refusal of goodwill that reads as if it were assembled from three other refusals. You phoned. You were told it would be looked into. Weeks passed. Then the letter arrived, polite to the point of insult, closing the door.
The temptation now is to reply to the letter — to fire back a longer, angrier version of the phone call. Don’t. The letter is the end of one process and the start of another, and the second process has rules that work in your favour if you use them and against you if you don’t.
Rule one: you complain to the business first. The ombudsman won’t usually look at anything until the bank has had its chance. In practice the bank gets up to eight weeks to send a final response. If eight weeks pass and nothing comes, you don’t have to keep waiting — silence is a door too, and you can walk through it to the ombudsman.
Rule two is the clock already mentioned. Six months from the date on the final response. Not six months from when you got round to it, not six months from when it stopped bothering you. The date on the letter. Miss it and the ombudsman can decline to look, and no amount of feeling that this is unfair will reopen it.
Rule three sits further back and catches people who wait years. The ombudsman generally can’t consider a complaint about something that happened more than six years ago — or, if that has already passed, more than three years from when you became aware, or reasonably should have, that you had cause to complain. It is the ombudsman, not the bank, who decides whether you are inside those lines.
So the shape of the thing is fixed before you write a word. A complaint to the business. Their answer, or their silence. Then, if it is still no, the free referral. What’s missing is the one document that makes the first step count: a complaint letter that a stranger at the bank, reading it cold, can act on without another phone call.
That letter is duller than your anger and far more useful. It says who you are and which account. It says what happened, in dates. It says what you want — the specific refund, the correction, the apology with teeth — because “sort it out” is not an instruction anyone can act on. It carries every screenshot and reference number. It does not threaten and it does not grovel. It exists partly to be answered and partly to be forwarded, because if the answer is still no, this same letter travels on to the ombudsman as the spine of the file.
Most people know roughly what they want to say and freeze at how to say it so it lands. That is the gap.
You can do all of this for free, and you should know the free routes first: Citizens Advice will talk it through, and the ombudsman’s own site walks you through the referral. The complaint costs nothing at either end. If you would rather not face a blank page, Chris will sit with you and build the complaint letter to the business out of what actually happened to you — the dates, the account, the outcome you are asking for, in the order that answers the obvious questions before they are raised. Then it points you at the ombudsman’s free form for the step after.
You answer a few questions. Chris drafts. You read every line and change whatever is yours to change.
And here it is — the complaint letter to the business, finished, with the free ombudsman referral queued behind it. Not a rant. A record.
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Free to start · no sign-up · no card. Tell Chris what has happened and see whether we can help before you pay anything. One matter · one case folder · a full day of drafting. If the drafts are not up to the standard you expected, email us within 7 days of paying for a full refund. If money is tight, Help with Fees can remove the court fee entirely, and Citizens Advice is free — we will always tell you when you do not need us.
Most people arrive for one letter and come back for the next thing the process throws at them.
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