Complaints — FOS and rail

Case history compiled from life-admin-tracker.md §4 (frozen original, 4 November 2026). Operational status lives in the app and case-status.md; this page explains the case.

4. Complaints

Section 75 Claim — escalated to the Financial Ombudsman

• Status: 🟠 With the Financial Ombudsman Service, awaiting an investigator
• Claim: Section 75 claim against HomeServe Finance Limited, the lender on the £2,954 fixed-sum loan for the BOXT boiler installation. Submitted 21 Jul 2026. (The BOXT complaint and the S75 claim are the same dispute, so they are tracked as one entry now.)
• HomeServe final response: 25 Sep 2026 (Caoimhe Whelan, Customer Relations). The external flue remedial work is confirmed complete. BOXT’s offer stands at £250 against the £450 asked for, and HomeServe will not raise it. They closed the complaint as their final position.
• FOS case reference: PNX-6154478-P3L2 — complaint received 24 Sep 2026, named against Homeserve Finance Limited.
• Ombudsman Connect: account registered and active. The portal is how FOS communicates, so watch it and the inbox.
• FOS timescales (their own guidance): an investigator within 6 to 8 weeks of submission, then 6 to 8 weeks from there to an outcome. Expect first contact around early to mid November and an outcome around the new year.
• Referral deadline: 6 months from the 25 Sep final response, so ~25 Mar 2027. Not a constraint now that it is submitted.
• Open question: whether to take BOXT’s £250 directly. It is a live offer, and accepting it may settle the matter, so that is a decision to make deliberately rather than by default.
• Portal monitoring — password reset 10 Oct 2026, vault not yet updated. case-watch had been locked out of Ombudsman Connect: the vault password was rejected and two failed attempts on 30 Sep counted against the account, which locks on the next one. Joe reset the password on the portal on 10 Oct 2026, but the vault item FOS Financial Ombudsman still holds the pre-reset value: a single sign-in attempt on 10 Oct reached the password screen and was rejected (“Please enter valid password to proceed”), so one failed attempt has now been used. Do not retry until the new password is in the vault.
  • Verified about the flow (read-only probes, 10 Oct): the portal redirects to an Azure AD B2C page, step 1 is email only (#signInName → #continue, accepted), step 2 is the password (#password), and step 3 is a one-time passcode, since the same screen offers “Reset how you receive your one-time passcode”.
  • Not yet automated. The fos portal in case-watch.py still carries fetcher: None, enabled: False, and no fetch_fos has been written. The passcode step needs one live run to pin down before a fetcher can be finished and tested.
• Next action: get the new password into the vault item (Joe by hand, or an agent-run “Forgot your password?” reset that stores the new value). Then the fetcher is one build and one test away. FOS will make contact in the meantime — an investigator is due early to mid November.

Rail Ombudsman — LNER

• Status: ✅ Closed — LNER compensated Joe (confirmed by Joe, 10 Oct 2026)
• Reference: R175958, against LNER (London North Eastern Railway)
• Filed: 04/09/2026 · Outcome: compensation received
• Last state read from the portal (2 Oct 2026): the ladder had reached Response Received 23/09/2026, with Complete still pending. The closure itself was not read from the portal, so the ladder above is the last verified position rather than the ending.
• Documents (3): Application Form.pdf · Gmail - Thank you for your enquiry Joe.pdf · Gmail - Seat Guarantee.pdf — all uploaded 04/09/2026 19:49
• Next action: none. Case closed.
• Monitoring: retired 10 Oct 2026 — the rail portal was removed from case-watch.py, so it is no longer polled daily. Nothing left to watch.
• Was previously untracked: this live complaint had no entry in any tracker until 2 Oct 2026.

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