A short-term rise inside a longer fall
The uphold rate for Financial Ombudsman decisions on Section 75 goods and services claims rose by 4.5 percentage points in the most recent 90-day window, reaching 17.4% from 12.9% in the prior window. On its own, that looks like a modest recovery for consumers pursuing retailers and suppliers through their card or credit provider. Set against the wider run of data Veste has analysed, it looks more like a small upward wobble in a rate that has fallen a long way from where it stood two years ago.
The current 90-day window contained 1,093 decisions, down from 1,605 in the prior window, a fall of 512 decisions, or 31.9%. Both windows meet Veste's minimum sample threshold of 30 decisions, so the comparison is not resting on a handful of cases. But a rate change happening at the same time as a third of the volume disappears is worth treating carefully. Fewer decisions can shift a percentage rate quite easily, and the direction of travel over the preceding year suggests this bump has not undone the underlying pattern.
The numbers behind the movement
Section 75 goods and services claims form a substantial part of the Ombudsman's published casework. Across the full period Veste holds data for, from 2 April 2013 to 15 June 2026, there have been 19,803 such decisions, of which 6,336 were upheld, 1,441 partially upheld and 12,026 not upheld, giving an overall uphold rate of 35.6% under Veste's definition (upheld cases plus half of partially upheld cases, divided by total decisions).
That long-run rate of 35.6% is well above both the 12.9% recorded in the prior 90-day window and the 17.4% recorded in the current one. It is also above the uphold rate across the entire Financial Ombudsman corpus Veste tracks, all product types combined, which stands at 28.8% from 401,815 decisions. In other words, Section 75 claims have historically upheld at a noticeably higher rate than the average Ombudsman decision, but the most recent data sits well below both the category's own long-run average and the corpus-wide baseline.
What the monthly series shows
Veste's monthly trend data runs for 25 months, from June 2024 to June 2026. It tells a clearer story than the 90-day comparison alone.
In June 2024 the uphold rate stood at 40.3% from 62 decisions. It climbed through the second half of 2024, reaching 46.7% in November 2024 (184 decisions) and 46.5% in March 2025 (227 decisions). From spring 2025 the rate began drifting down: 37% in April 2025, 35.6% in May 2025, then a run through the summer and autumn in the 30s: 40.5% in July, 37.6% in August, 33.1% in September, 31.8% in October and 33.6% in November.
The steepest change comes at the turn of the year. December 2025 saw 471 decisions with an uphold rate of 19.7%, a marked step down from November's 33.6%. Volume rose further even as the rate kept falling: January 2026 recorded 557 decisions at a 14.5% uphold rate, February 2026 recorded 570 decisions at 10.4%, the lowest point in the series, and March 2026 recorded 690 decisions, the highest monthly volume in the run, at 13.2%. Volume then eased back sharply: April 2026 had 228 decisions (17.1%), May 2026 had 313 (20.8%) and June 2026, the most recent month in the data, had 213 decisions at 16.7%.
Read against that monthly pattern, the 90-day period comparison looks like it is capturing the modest recovery seen in April and May 2026 relative to the trough of December 2025 to March 2026, rather than a return to the levels seen through most of 2024 and early 2025.
The annual picture confirms the direction
Year-on-year figures reinforce this. In 2022, 1,782 decisions were published at a 36.3% uphold rate. In 2023, 1,490 decisions at 36.1%. In 2024, 1,609 decisions at 41.2%, the highest annual rate in the recent series. In 2025, volume rose sharply to 2,723 decisions but the rate fell to 34.6%. In 2026 so far, 2,571 decisions have been published at an uphold rate of 14.4%, less than half the 2025 figure and well under a third of the 2024 peak. All five years meet Veste's minimum sample threshold, so these are not small-number artefacts.
The combination of the annual series and the monthly trend points to the same conclusion: 2026 has seen both higher decision volumes than in earlier years and a substantially lower uphold rate, with the recent 90-day uplift representing a partial recovery from the very lowest months rather than a reversal of the broader shift.
Firm and product mix
Veste's data on the largest firms by Section 75 goods and services decision volume shows considerable variation in uphold rates, though it does not identify which of these firms feature more heavily in the most recent low-uphold months. Among firms meeting the minimum sample size, Creation Consumer Finance Ltd had the highest uphold rate of the ten listed, at 71.2% across 533 decisions (357 upheld, 45 partial, 131 not upheld). Santander Consumer (UK) Plc recorded 59.8% across 480 decisions, and Close Brothers Limited recorded 54.3% across 476 decisions. At the other end, Mitsubishi HC Capital UK Plc recorded 9% across 635 decisions (50 upheld, 14 partial, 571 not upheld), and Shawbrook Bank Limited recorded 15.6% across 1,626 decisions, the largest single volume of any firm in this list, with 232 upheld, 43 partial and 1,351 not upheld. Clydesdale Financial Services Limited recorded 18.2% across 1,017 decisions.
These are firm-level figures for Section 75 goods and services decisions specifically, and firms are counted by the exact business name recorded on each decision. That means subsidiaries or trading names belonging to the same wider banking group appear as separate entries and are not combined, which readers should bear in mind when comparing volumes across the sector.
Against related product categories, Section 75 goods and services claims sit in the middle of the range. Motor finance (PCP/HP) decisions have an uphold rate of 49.7% across 9,018 decisions, well above the Section 75 figure. Personal loans stand at 25.6% across 4,706 decisions and credit cards at 23.1% across 4,335 decisions, both below the Section 75 long-run average. Home insurance, a smaller category, shows 51.9% across 54 decisions.
What individual decisions illustrate
Veste's underlying decisions from mid-June 2026 give some texture to how outcomes are reasoned, though a handful of cases cannot establish a trend on their own.
One decision, against MI Vehicle Finance Limited trading as Mann Island, was not upheld. A complainant had raised a potential vehicle defect roughly six months after purchase but only obtained diagnostic evidence more than two years later, after driving a further 23,000 miles; the Ombudsman found there was insufficient evidence the fault existed at the point of sale.
A second decision, against Black Horse Limited, was upheld. The vehicle required repairs including a driveshaft replacement and a cracked, swollen timing belt within five months of purchase, and the Ombudsman found the car was not of satisfactory quality when supplied, directing reimbursement of £1,156.54 in repair costs plus interest, an existing offer of £226.46, and £250 compensation for distress.
A third, against Clydesdale Financial Services Limited trading as Barclays Partner Finance, was not upheld because the complainant could not provide documentation linking a 2008 credit agreement to a timeshare that later entered liquidation, a necessary condition for Section 75 liability.
A fourth, against Mitsubishi HC Capital UK PLC, was not upheld. The Ombudsman found no actionable misrepresentation under Section 75 over a timeshare purchase, though it noted a possible regulatory breach unrelated to the Section 75 claim itself.
These four cases show the range of factual questions that arise in Section 75 disputes, from vehicle quality and durability to whether a credit agreement is properly connected to a failed supplier. They are illustrations of how such claims are decided, not evidence of a pattern at any single firm.
What the data does not show
Veste's figures describe published Ombudsman decisions, not the full population of complaints made to any firm, and not every dispute that reaches the Ombudsman results in a published decision. The data does not indicate why decision volumes rose so sharply through the winter of 2025 into early 2026, nor why the uphold rate fell over the same period; Veste can observe the pattern but not attribute a specific cause to it from this dataset alone. Similarly, the firm-level totals reflect Section 75 goods and services decisions and cannot be used to characterise a firm's overall complaint handling across other products.
The implication
The 4.5 percentage point rise in the latest 90-day window is real and both comparison windows contain enough decisions to be measured reliably. But it sits within a run of monthly data showing the uphold rate falling from the mid-40s in late 2024 to single figures in February 2026, alongside a substantial rise in decision volume over the same period. Anyone using the most recent quarter alone to judge whether outcomes for Section 75 complainants are improving would be reading only the last few data points of a much longer decline. The more complete picture, drawn from 25 months of monthly data and five years of annual figures, is one of a category whose uphold rate has fallen well below both its own long-run average and the wider Ombudsman corpus rate, with the latest quarter representing a partial, not full, recovery from the low point.