Backbench Business — Nuisance Phone Calls — [Mr Dai Havard in the Chair]

Part of the debate – in Westminster Hall at 3:13 pm on 28 February 2013.

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Photo of Iain McKenzie Iain McKenzie Labour, Inverclyde 3:13, 28 February 2013

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Havard. I congratulate the Backbench Business Committee on bringing this debate before us. Many of us have been contacted by constituents about this subject in the past weeks, if not months.

Anger over nuisance calls is growing, and rightly so. The latest Ofcom complaints data show that complaints to the Telephone Preference Service increased 150% from July 2011 to July 2012. Many of my constituents have regularly received nuisance calls that are supposedly from within the UK. They are told there is something wrong with their computer and that the caller is qualified by Microsoft to fix it for a fee. They may also be asked for personal details, but the details some people reveal are passed on, and, lo and behold, those people then receive another call, about anything from what they do in their leisure time to their choice in shoes.

A constituent told me of a call they have received, which starts with the words, “This is an urgent message about your personal pension.” It goes on to say, “Press 5 for immediate action,” at which point, the person receiving the call can be signed up to something. The message then says, “Or press 9 to be removed from our database”, although the company will, of course, do no such thing, and the person will receive the calls over and over again. Dialling 1471 in the hope of finding out who is calling just results in hearing, “We do not have the caller’s number.”

Thousands of people up and down the country have to deal with this every day, and many of them are elderly. For many vulnerable and elderly people, nuisance calls are a menace, and one that puts them at risk of fraud—just as if a crook or pushy salesman had turned up on their doorstep offering to sell them this, that and the other. People are experiencing this every day over the phone.

A growing number of nuisance calls come from overseas, and there seems to be no way of protecting the British public from them at the moment. Many people have been victims of terrible scams and have lost money, which they can ill afford to lose at this time.

In 2010, Parliament approved an increase in the financial penalty available to Ofcom to enforce its rules on nuisance calls, from £50,000 to £2 million. Yet, there is still no real action. The Information Commissioner’s Office has fined just one company in the past 18 months. Studies show that 76% of people who have suffered from nuisance calls were still receiving unsolicited calls despite being registered with the Telephone Preference Service.

What is being done, therefore, to improve the situation? The TPS makes it clear on its website that there has been a rise in the number of unwanted calls made to people registered with it. However, it says that most of them originate from companies that deliberately ignore the law or disguise their identity.