Financial Guidance and Claims Bill [HL]

Baroness Stowell of Beeston Excerpts

Committee: 4th sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 13th September 2017 Lords Chamber

When the Minister refers to cold calling in her reply, will she say whether telephone cold calling, SMS messages, emails and letters—the old-fashioned snail mail—all fall into the same category or whether it is right to differentiate between them? If you make it impossible in all circumstances for a consumer to have access to a CMC of any kind, it may be counterproductive. It has to be reasonable. The Government have to do many things that are not popular, but if they were to act quickly to outlaw cold calling and nuisance calling, it would be extremely popular.

[Baroness Stowell of Beeston (Con)]

My Lords, I am sorry that I was not in the Chamber earlier to hear my noble friend Lord Hunt of Wirral make his contributions on earlier amendments on a similar theme. I should declare that I have recently become a member of the board of ABTA.

I know that the explosion of claims for holiday sickness has been mentioned already, and I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Sharkey, and my noble friend for highlighting the way in which cold calling is encouraging people to commit fraud. However, we need to recognise that in encouraging this kind of fraudulent behaviour—which, in itself, is very bad for all the obvious reasons—false holiday sickness claims are also affecting our reputation abroad. We might like to make fun sometimes about the Germans and their towels, but we Brits are now gaining a reputation not only for having dicky tummies and not being able to weather the food overseas but, much worse than that, as a nation of people who are now willing to commit fraud.

This goes more broadly than the narrow way in which we are debating it today, and I want to lend my support in principle to the efforts to tackle a growing and serious problem.

[The Earl of Lytton (CB)]

My Lords, I would not normally deign to interpose in this debate but, having listened to a number of the arguments that have been put forward, I feel compelled to voice my support, but with a word of warning.

I was looking at my private emails and found that since half-past two this afternoon I have had four spurious emails from an outfit called Metro Bank, with which I have no business, telling me about the suspicious activity on my account and suggesting that I might like to click on a link. The fact that such messages usually contain spelling mistakes and start off “Dear Customer” without any other personal identifying information, and the fact of the sheer number of these repeated emails, probably tells its own story, but never mind. The reason I raise that is because in my experience—along with that of probably everybody in this House who has received on their mobile phone something to do with PPI or a personal accident—I frequently get messages that tell me my claim has been settled in the sum of £4,275.80, or something like that, and ask me to click on a link so they can process the claim. I have had no such incident and made no such claim; the process is led by a completely bogus and fraudulent promise of something for nothing.

In my experience, these things are increasingly moving from a posse of anonymous, but still identifiable, 0800 telephone numbers of one sort or another to people’s mobile numbers and landlines. In particular, the mobile numbers may well be a pay-as-you-go account: completely anonymous and possibly passed on in a pub, complete with its ticket. Nobody can track down where these things are coming from. So, if somebody makes a cold call from a pay-as-you-go mobile phone, and having made contact then pass that live contact back to a claims management company of perhaps no great repute and even less good intent, is that still a cold call? If not, then straightaway the whole process of what these amendments are designed to deal with is bypassed. I would like to make sure it is not.