A higher uphold rate, but on far fewer decisions
Bank of Scotland Plc's uphold rate rose by 5.1 percentage points in the most recent 90-day window compared with the one before it, moving from 10.5% to 15.6%, according to Veste's analysis of published Financial Ombudsman decisions. On its own, that looks like a meaningful deterioration in outcomes for the bank. Look at the volume figures alongside it, however, and the picture becomes more complicated.
The number of decisions in the current 90-day window was 122, down from 286 in the prior window, a fall of 164 decisions, or 57.3%. Both windows meet Veste's minimum sample threshold of 30 decisions, so the comparison is not disqualified on statistical grounds. But a near-halving of case volume alongside a rise in the uphold rate is exactly the kind of pattern that deserves scrutiny before it is treated as a signal about the bank's underlying conduct or service.
The numbers in full
Across the entire supplied history for Bank of Scotland Plc, Veste has recorded 27,168 decisions. Of these, 1,768 were fully upheld, 2,499 were partially upheld and 22,901 were not upheld, giving an overall uphold rate of 11.1% under Veste's definition, which weights partial upholds at half value: (upheld + 0.5 x partially upheld) / total. That all-time rate sits well below the corpus-wide baseline uphold rate of 28.8% across 400,895 decisions covering all firms and categories in the Veste dataset. Bank of Scotland Plc's decisions, taken as a whole, have historically been upheld less often than the typical published Ombudsman decision.
The first decision involving the firm in Veste's records dates to 3 April 2013, and the most recent to 5 June 2026.
Zooming into the monthly trend
The monthly series covers 25 months, from June 2024 to June 2026. Uphold rates in that window have moved around a fair amount without settling into an obvious sustained direction. In June 2024, the uphold rate stood at 23.3% on 73 decisions. It fell through the second half of 2024 and into 2025, reaching a low of 8.5% in October 2025 on 82 decisions, and again 8.5% in December 2025 on 100 decisions. It then rose to 12.2% in January 2026 and 13.4% in February 2026, before settling at 12.3% in March 2026 on 126 decisions, the largest monthly total in the series.
The final three months in the series show a marked drop in volume: 13 decisions in April 2026, 17 in May 2026, and just 4 in June 2026. The uphold rate in April 2026 was 30.8%, in May 2026 it was 14.7%, and in June 2026 it was 0.0%. These are extremely small monthly counts, and the swings between them illustrate why single-month or short-window uphold rates for a firm can move sharply on a handful of cases. A change of one or two decisions in either direction, upheld or not, has a much larger effect on a percentage when the base is 4 or 13 than when it is 126.
This matters directly for interpreting the 90-day period comparison. The current 90-day window's total of 122 decisions overlaps with this stretch of falling monthly volume, including the very thin April, May and June 2026 months. A rate calculated from a smaller pool of decisions is more sensitive to the mix of individual cases that happened to be published in that period, rather than necessarily reflecting a shift in how Bank of Scotland Plc is handling complaints.
The longer annual picture
Year-on-year figures offer a steadier vantage point, though they are calendar-year totals rather than a repeat of the 90-day comparison. In 2022, Bank of Scotland Plc's uphold rate was 17.4% on 935 decisions. In 2023, it was 16.5% on 766 decisions. In 2024, it rose slightly to 17.5% on 914 decisions. In 2025, it fell to 12.6% on 997 decisions, a larger annual sample than any of the preceding three years. The partial-year 2026 figure, covering the months to date in Veste's data, stands at 13.3% on 346 decisions.
Set against this run, the annual uphold rate has generally sat in a range roughly between 12.6% and 17.5% over the past five years, all comfortably below the corpus-wide baseline of 28.8%. The 2025 figure of 12.6% and the 2026 year-to-date figure of 13.3% are both below the earlier 2022-2024 range, which suggests the recent 90-day uptick to 15.6% has occurred against a backdrop where annual rates had already been drifting down rather than up. That makes the short-term rise look less like the start of a new upward trend and more like a movement within a lower band the firm has occupied for the past two years.
What might be driving the numbers, and what the data cannot say
Veste's dataset does not include a firm-level breakdown of Bank of Scotland Plc's decisions by product or issue type, so it is not possible to say from this evidence whether the volume decline or the rate rise is concentrated in any particular product line, such as mortgages, overdrafts or current accounts. The four individual example decisions supplied for the most recent period, all dated between 1 and 5 June 2026, were not upheld. They covered a mortgage possession delay and property sale dispute, a buy-to-let mortgage administration complaint spanning a decade, an irresponsible lending and overdraft monitoring complaint dismissed in part due to delay in raising it, and a Direct Debit Guarantee dispute connected to payments to an energy broker. These four cases illustrate the range of issues reaching the Ombudsman involving this firm; they are not a representative sample of the 122 decisions in the current window and should not be read as evidence of a trend, since all four happened to be not upheld.
It is also worth noting, as a matter of method rather than allegation, that Veste's data groups decisions by the business name recorded on each individual Ombudsman decision. Subsidiaries or related entities within the same banking group are not merged, so figures for Bank of Scotland Plc reflect only decisions published under that specific name and should not be read as covering the wider corporate group.
Complaint categories in context
Veste's related-category data, which spans all firms rather than Bank of Scotland Plc specifically, shows how uphold rates vary by complaint type across the wider corpus. PPI mis-selling complaints have an uphold rate of 7.4% across 15,218 decisions, the lowest of the categories supplied. Irresponsible lending complaints, by contrast, have an uphold rate of 25.6% across 626 decisions, and service failures generally sit at 21.1% across 1,164 decisions. Mortgage administration and arrears handling complaints, relevant to two of the four example decisions above, have an uphold rate of 14.4% across 1,636 decisions industry-wide. These figures provide useful context for where complaint categories generally sit relative to each other, though they are not broken down specifically for Bank of Scotland Plc in the supplied data, so no direct comparison between the firm's rate and these category rates should be drawn.
What this does and does not show
The supplied data supports a narrow, factual conclusion: Bank of Scotland Plc's uphold rate rose by 5.1 percentage points between two 90-day windows, while the number of decisions fell by 164, a 57.3% drop. Both windows are large enough to meet Veste's minimum sampling threshold, so the movement is not simply an artefact of a tiny sample. But the sharp decline in monthly volumes visible in April, May and June 2026, down to as few as 4 decisions in the most recent month, means the current window's rate is more exposed to the effect of individual cases than the prior window's rate was. The annual data also shows that 2025 and year-to-date 2026 rates were already below the 2022-2024 range before this particular 90-day rise occurred.
This analysis draws only on published Ombudsman decisions, not the total number of complaints Bank of Scotland Plc received, many of which will be resolved without ever reaching a published decision or without a decision being published at all. It does not indicate the causes behind any individual complaint outcome, and it does not establish that the bank's practices have changed over this period.
The practical takeaway
For a firm handling the volumes Bank of Scotland Plc does, a single 90-day window with 122 decisions is a meaningful but comparatively small slice of its long-run record of 27,168 decisions since 2013. The rise from 10.5% to 15.6% is real in the data, but it sits within a period of falling volume and follows two years, 2025 and 2026 to date, in which the annual uphold rate had already fallen below its 2022-2024 range. Anyone tracking this firm's Ombudsman performance would be better served by watching whether the higher rate persists as monthly volumes recover, rather than treating one 90-day movement as decisive.