A falling uphold rate on rising volume
In the most recent 90-day window measured by Veste, the Financial Ombudsman published 900 decisions on motor finance complaints covering Personal Contract Purchase, Hire Purchase and related conditional sale agreements. Of those, 23.9% were upheld or partially upheld, using the Ombudsman's standard weighting. In the prior 90-day window, the comparable rate was 31.2% from 844 decisions. That is a fall of 7.3 percentage points, alongside an increase in decision volume of 56 cases, or 6.6%.
Both windows meet Veste's minimum sample threshold of 30 decisions, so the comparison is not resting on a handful of cases either side. But a 7.3 percentage point swing across 900 versus 844 decisions is still the kind of movement that needs testing against the longer run of data before anyone draws conclusions from it, and this article does that testing.
The headline numbers
Across the full corpus available to Veste, motor finance complaints have generated 19,455 published decisions, of which 6,359 were upheld, 1,956 partially upheld and 11,140 not upheld. That gives an overall uphold rate of 37.7% since the earliest decision in this dataset, dated 4 April 2013, through to the most recent, dated 15 June 2026. For comparison, the uphold rate across the entire Veste corpus of 401,815 decisions on all products is 28.8%. Motor finance has therefore historically upheld at a materially higher rate than the wider population of Ombudsman decisions, though the gap has been narrowing, as the monthly and annual figures below show.
What the monthly series shows
Veste's monthly series runs for 25 months, from June 2024 to June 2026. It shows a product that ran at uphold rates mostly in the high 30s and low 40s per cent through the second half of 2024 and into early 2025. March 2025 recorded a rate of 45.2% from 219 decisions, one of the higher points in the series. From around August 2025 the pattern shifts. August 2025 produced 292 decisions at a 30.8% uphold rate, September 2025 saw the largest monthly volume in the run to that point at 386 decisions and a 29.9% rate, and by October 2025 the rate had fallen to 27.7% from 242 decisions.
Volumes then rose sharply into 2026. March 2026 alone produced 504 decisions, the highest single month in the series, with an uphold rate of 23.2%. April 2026 saw 236 decisions at 23.5%, May 2026 saw 247 decisions at 26.5%, and the most recent month in the series, June 2026, recorded 142 decisions at a 28.9% uphold rate. Volume in June 2026 is markedly lower than the March peak, though the series may not yet be complete for the most recent month given publication lags.
Taken together, the monthly figures show the fall captured in the 90-day comparison is not a one-month blip. It reflects a run of roughly ten months, from around August 2025 onward, in which the uphold rate has generally sat below the levels seen in the first half of the 25-month series, against a backdrop of rising monthly decision counts.
The longer-term picture
Veste's year-on-year figures extend this further back and show a fairly steady decline. In 2022, motor finance decisions numbered 1,500 with an uphold rate of 40.0%. In 2023, 1,354 decisions produced a 39.1% rate. In 2024, 1,763 decisions produced 38.7%. In 2025, the volume rose sharply to 2,938 decisions while the rate fell to 35.5%. In the partial year to date for 2026, 1,669 decisions have produced a rate of 26.8%.
This is a five-year run, 2022 through to the partial 2026 figure, in which the uphold rate has fallen in every successive year while the number of published decisions has generally grown, particularly in 2025 and into 2026. The scale of that growth in decision volume, more than doubling from 1,354 in 2023 to 2,938 in 2025, indicates the Ombudsman is processing and publishing substantially more motor finance decisions than it was three years ago. A rising caseload combined with a falling uphold rate is consistent with several different explanations, including changes in the mix of complaint types reaching decision stage, changes in how firms are responding to complaints before they reach a decision, or genuine shifts in the merits of the complaints being decided. The data supplied to Veste does not distinguish between these explanations.
Firm mix: sample sizes support comparison, but subsidiaries are not merged
Veste's top-firm figures for motor finance, all meeting the minimum sample of 30 decisions, show considerable spread in uphold rates. Volkswagen Financial Services (UK) Limited has the largest volume among the firms listed, with 1,727 decisions and a 31.2% uphold rate (432 upheld, 212 partially upheld, 1,083 not upheld). Mercedes-Benz Financial Services UK Limited recorded 1,140 decisions at 33.5%. Moneybarn No. 1 Limited recorded 1,080 decisions at 28.6%. Black Horse Limited recorded 1,051 decisions at 29.4%.
At the higher end, Santander Consumer (UK) Plc recorded 785 decisions at 49.0%, and Close Brothers Limited recorded 622 decisions at 53.5%, the highest uphold rate among the firms listed here. BMW Financial Services appears twice in Veste's figures under two separate spellings of its name, 716 decisions at 47.7% under one rendering and 697 decisions at 45.9% under another. This is not a discrepancy in the underlying decisions; it reflects Veste's stated methodology of counting firms by the exact business name recorded on each published decision, without rolling subsidiaries or name variants of the same group into a single total. Readers comparing firms should bear this in mind, and it also means the market-share implied by any single firm's total in this dataset may understate its true published volume if its name appears in more than one form. MotoNovo Finance Limited recorded 553 decisions at 45.0%, and FirstRand Bank Limited recorded 540 decisions at 42.3%.
The spread between the lowest uphold rate in this group, Moneybarn No. 1 Limited at 28.6%, and the highest, Close Brothers Limited at 53.5%, is wide. It shows that the aggregate motor finance uphold rate is not evenly distributed across lenders; different firms, different complaint mixes and different periods within the dataset all contribute to firm-level differences. None of this establishes that any individual firm is performing better or worse than another in a wider operational sense. It describes only the outcomes of the published decisions Veste has recorded against each name.
What appears to be driving the movement, and what does not
Veste's related complaint-category figures offer one useful piece of context. Complaints specifically categorised as PCP/HP mis-selling show a much lower uphold rate, 19.9% from 2,442 decisions, than the broader motor finance product figure of 37.7%. Complaints about motor finance commission, sometimes referred to as discretionary commission arrangements, show an uphold rate of just 1.0% from 198 decisions, which is a strikingly low rate relative to every other category in this dataset. Irresponsible lending complaints, a separate category with 2,849 decisions, show a rate of 34.3%, closer to the overall motor finance figure.
These category-level rates suggest that the composition of complaint types reaching a decision matters as much as the identity of the lender. If the mix of decisions being published has shifted toward categories such as PCP/HP mis-selling or motor finance commission, which carry materially lower uphold rates, that alone could account for some of the fall in the aggregate rate, independent of any change in lender behaviour or Ombudsman approach. Veste's data does not include a month-by-month breakdown of category mix, so this can be described as a plausible contributing factor rather than a demonstrated cause.
Individual decisions as illustration
Veste's supplied examples, all decided on 15 June 2026, illustrate the range of issues reaching decision stage rather than proving any trend. One case involved a hire purchase customer who complained a car was not of satisfactory quality at the point of sale after a fault code was found in a health check some two and a half years after purchase; the Ombudsman found insufficient evidence the fault existed at the point of supply, given the vehicle had by then covered a further 23,000 miles, and did not uphold the complaint. A second concerned a wrongful termination complaint against BMW Financial Services (GB) Limited, where the customer's agreement was terminated after arrears exceeded £10,000 despite multiple default notices; the Ombudsman found the lender had acted within its contractual rights and considered £500 compensation for poor communication appropriate, again not upholding the substantive complaint. A third involved an undisclosed broker commission of £1,055.47 on a hire purchase agreement; applying the Supreme Court's test from Hopcraft, Johnson and Wrench, the Ombudsman found the commission, while undisclosed, was fixed rather than discretionary and represented 13% of the amount borrowed, and did not find the lending relationship unfair. A fourth concerned irresponsible lending and voluntary termination handling against Moneybarn No.1 Limited; the Ombudsman found the lender's affordability checks were not sufficiently thorough but that further checks would still have shown the payments affordable, and accepted an offer of £250 compensation and removal of a default marker as a fair resolution.
All four of these illustrative decisions ended in a not-upheld outcome. They are included here to show the type of dispute reaching a decision, not as evidence of the direction of the overall uphold rate; the aggregate trend already described draws on the full monthly and period-level figures, not on individual cases.
What the data does and does not show
The data shows a clear, multi-year decline in the motor finance uphold rate, from 40.0% in 2022 to 26.8% in the year to date for 2026, alongside a substantial rise in the number of decisions published each year. It shows the most recent 90-day window recorded a lower uphold rate, 23.9%, than the window before it, 31.2%, on a larger caseload. It shows this is consistent with, rather than contradicted by, the preceding ten months of monthly data.
What the data does not show is why. It does not identify a specific change in FOS decision-making criteria, a specific change in how any lender handles complaints, or a specific shift in the underlying merits of complaints being brought. It does not allow Veste to attribute the fall to any single firm, since firm-level uphold rates vary widely and no firm-level monthly breakdown was supplied. And because published decisions are not the same population as all complaints made to a firm, none of these figures describe the proportion of a firm's total complaint book that gets upheld; they describe only the subset that reaches a published Ombudsman decision.
The implication for anyone following this data
For readers tracking motor finance complaint outcomes, the practical point is that the uphold rate has been on a sustained downward path for several years, not just in the latest quarter, and that this has happened alongside rising, not falling, decision volumes. A single 90-day comparison read in isolation might look like noise; read against five years of annual figures and 25 months of monthly data, it looks like the continuation of an established pattern. Whether that pattern continues, and what is driving it, will depend on factors this dataset cannot isolate, including the mix of complaint categories reaching the Ombudsman and any changes in the process before a case gets that far.