(For more future updates, kindly subscribe to this blog's feeds via RSS reader or via e-mail.)

The latest Bank of England (BoE) figures show that as a nation we owe about £233bn on credit cards, overdrafts and other loans. For many people the credit crunch has provided a gentle or forceful suggestion that they address their level of debt.

Even though people have been facing the prospect of losing their jobs or even their homes, and addressing one’s personal debt level has become an increasing priority for many, some people face waits of several weeks to see a debt adviser.

The Citizens Advice Bureau (CAB) says it has seen a big increase in the number of people seeking advice about debt, in particular with problems regarding mortgage arrears and unemployment.

The government has put a lot of money into new debt advisers, including the Financial Inclusion Fund, the £45m the government handed out to organisations, including the CAB, to pay for new debt advisers.

The CAB acknowledges this and also says branches have been able to extend their opening hours thanks to a grant received at the beginning of the year. But they are still struggling to deal with the numbers coming through their doors.

They have also been producing self-help leaflets to provide advice to people without having to see an adviser. Many of the people turning to the CAB have been made redundant and never needed debt advice before.

However, not all advice agencies say they are struggling to cope with the increased number of queries, many services which offer advice over the phone or online say that they are meeting the demand.

For example, in the first six months of the year the Consumer Credit Counselling Service (CCCS) answered just over 152,000 calls, compared with 106,000 in the first six months of 2008.

An Financial Services Authority (FSA) survey has recently found that while 70% of people thought that staying up-to-date with their financial affairs was important, 42% admitted to monitoring their finances less than once a month. This is something the FSA’s new financial capability scheme wants to address.

It aims to educate and inform consumers to take greater responsibility for their financial affairs. Aiming to reach 10 million people by 2011, the FSA says it has already reached seven million. But it has been criticised for being slow to react.

In their white paper on banking reform, the Conservative Party has said that they would abolish the FSA and replace it with a consumer protection agency. This would make sense if the transition was handles effectively so that whatever happens to the FSA, its consumer work will carry on, even if under a different body.

(For more future updates, kindly subscribe to this blog's feeds via RSS reader or via e-mail.)

Figures have come to light this week which are remarkable. They show that more than nine million individual complaints were made to firms in the financial services industry in the period from 2006 to 2008.

The Financial Services Authority (FSA) has published the complaints figures for the first time and they show that banking and loans accounted for more than half the formal complaints made to financial companies in that period.

Regular readers will be aware of my stance regarding large banks and appreciate my total lack of surprise at this news.

By the second half of 2008, 40% of the complaints were being settled in the favour of the customer. The figures have been driven by huge numbers of complaints about bank overdraft charges, cash advance services and the mis-selling of payment protection insurance and mortgage endowments.

Individual companies will start to publish their own complaints data from July 2010.

The total number of complaints rose from 2,727,000 in 2006 to 3,411,000 in 2007 before dropping back last year to 2,903,000. There would have been more but for the fact that the FSA told regulated firms in the middle of 2007 that they did not have to include new complaints about charges for unauthorised overdrafts levied by banks and building societies.

More than 1.2 million of these complaints have since been “frozen” until the issue is settled by the courts.

A spokesman for the consumer group Which? has been quoted saying that, “it’s a poor reflection on the industry that there are so many unhappy customers out there. Financial firms simply aren’t treating consumers well enough and things must change if the industry is to rebuild its reputation.”

The FSA’s figures were dominated by complaints about current accounts, especially by demands for the return of overdraft fees, which reached 3,513,000 over the three-year period.

There were 908,000 complaints about the mis-selling of mortgage endowments during the period, although their number tailed off dramatically during the three years. Complaints about credit cards were the third most frequents at 745,000.

A surge in the number of complaints about payment protection insurance (PPI) saw the number of complaints about general insurance and “pure protection” policies double, from 62,000 to 127,000, between the first half of 2006 and the second half of 2008.

In April this year, the Financial Services Ombudsman (FOS), which deals with complaints that firms cannot settle themselves, accused many firms of being deliberately unhelpful.

The vast majority of industry complaints were settled within eight weeks with, by the end of last year, just 10% taking longer to deal with. Last year, the firms most likely to admit making a mistake were building societies, who settled 59% of complaints in their customers’ favour.

The figures are interesting in what they tell us about the current state of the financial services industry in the UK. Nine million complaints in three years is a tremendous amount and shows that financial companies, especially the banks, but also the FSA itself has a lot of work to do.