Written by lawyers. Free to read. Nothing to sell you.
What is the aim of this site?
Kick Up a Fuss is a publication about complaining well. The process, the deadlines, the rights, and the evidence about what actually works. When a company gets something wrong, there is almost always a free, structured route to getting it put right. Most people aren’t aware of the route, half-use it, or pay a third of their own money to a firm that fills in a free form. We exist to close that gap.
Everything here is built to be used: the process, start to finish, a router that tells you which scheme covers you, letters you can copy, deadlines you can track, and real cases from readers showing how it goes.
Why it exists
Complaining in the UK changed in April 2025, when the Financial Ombudsman began charging professional representatives to bring cases. The claims-firm model shrank almost overnight, and the people those firms served were left to represent themselves, mostly without anyone showing them how.
Here is the part the claims industry never advertised: you were always better off without them. Complaints brought directly to the Financial Ombudsman were upheld 38% of the time, against 26% for those brought by paid representatives, and the direct complainant kept all of the money they received. The system is designed to be used by ordinary people in plain words. It just needed explaining properly, by people qualified to read the rules at source.
Who makes it
Kick Up a Fuss is edited by Chris Barber, a solicitor who has spent his career reading the rules companies hope you won’t. Every guide is checked against the primary source, the legislation, the FCA Handbook, the scheme’s own published rules, before it carries a claim, and our editorial policy sets out exactly how that works.
The masthead is growing: contributors join under their own names, with their own credentials shown, and their work is reviewed before it publishes. If you write about consumer rights and care about getting it exactly right, we’d like to hear from you.
The site is published by Imprint House, which also publishes The Legal Brief, a news site for the legal profession.
What we will never do
We never handle your claim. We’re a publication, not a claims management company, and we’re not regulated to act for you. This is deliberate. We want to remain impartial and bring the information that empowers people to be able to make successful complaints. We show you how to run your own complaint, which the evidence says works better anyway.
We never advise on your individual case. Every complaint turns on its own facts, and general guidance on this site, however carefully checked, isn’t legal advice about yours.
We never take money that would compromise the first two. No share of what you get back, no payment from companies we cover, no claims-firm advertising. How we make money sets out how this site is funded.
Contact
Got a complaint story? Tell us what happened — that’s the fastest route and the one we read first. Spotted something wrong on the site? Corrections explains how we handle it, and we mean it. Anything else: hello@kickupafuss.co.uk.
We read everything. We can’t reply to requests for advice on individual complaints, not because we don’t care, but because this is not the service provides. The guides can, and they’re free. We can assist in pointing you to the right place.