protection insurance complaints. Impartiality The Financial Ombudsman Service publishes the proportion of complaints it upholds in favour of consumers. Across all complaints in 2013/2014 the ombudsman found 58% in favour of consumers. The ombudsman was set up by parliament to be an impartial and independent body, though its decisions can be criticised by the side that loses. Independent commentators acknowledge that the ombudsman service is a valuable free service for consumers – although those who feel they have "lost" a complaint might understandably feel let down and want to question the ombudsman's impartiality. Some consumers have questioned the amount of redress awarded by the ombudsman while many businesses expect the ombudsman to apply the compensation cap rigidly and lobbied against the increase (in January 2012) from £100,000 to £150,000 in the maximum compensation the ombudsman can tell a business to pay. Various websites have been set up to complain about the Financial Ombudsman's partiality – usually by people who disagree with particular ombudsman decisions. Complaints-handling performance of individual financial companies Since September 2009 the Financial Ombudsman Service has been publishing complaints data on its website every six months about named individual businesses. The data provided relates to businesses which have 30 or more new cases, or 30 or more resolved cases, in each six-month period. The data shows the number of new complaints, and the proportion of complaints upheld in favour of consumers. The complaints data shows that: just under 200 businesses (out of more than 100,000 covered by the ombudsman service) together generate around 90% of the complaints workload, the number of complaints relating to each individual business ranges from 30 to over 45,000, the proportion of cases upheld in favour of the consumer varies substantially from business to business – between 3% and 100%. Budget and staffing levels The entire ombudsman staff in 2007 (including substantial number of ancillary staff) was 960. They managed to handle 627,814 initial enquiries and close 111,673 cases which had been sent to for adjudication. The BBC reported in September 2007 that the ombudsman planned to reduce staff numbers to 600, reflecting the decline in mortgage endowment complaints. By December 2009 ombudsman staff had increased to over 1,000 – reflecting a substantially increased workload of 200,000 cases. Currently there are 4,500 people working at the ombudsman – reflecting a substantially increased workload of over half a million cases last year (2014/2015). Staffing levels