Nuisance Calls
Debate between Lord Vaizey of Didcot and Lord Stunell(10 years, 5 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text
Sir Andrew Stunell (Hazel Grove) (LD)
I apologise to the House for arriving a few minutes late at the start of the debate and to my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh West (Mike Crockart) for missing a few minutes of his tour de force. I did catch the final 35 minutes, however, so I hope that I got the essence of it.
I got out of my hon. Friend’s contribution and those of other Members that some of the stock responses and deflection tactics that are used by different parts of the industry do not stand up to detailed inspection. The Minister has a duty to the House, when he responds to the debate, to say clearly and firmly that the Government acknowledge that and are prepared to take action.
This is a troubling issue for my constituents. When my hon. Friend the Member for Cheadle (Mark Hunter), my neighbour in Stockport, started to deal with this matter for his constituents, he asked me whether we could have a combined approach to support our constituents. We both organised petitions for residents of our constituencies to make their case to us, and the response that we got was overwhelming. People were fed up with nuisance calls—whether automated recordings, calls from foreign calls centres or silent calls. Whatever time of day or night they come, they are overwhelmingly unpopular. They create trouble and difficulty, and my goodness me, our constituents in Cheadle and in Hazel Grove were ready to tell us about it.
Last autumn, my hon. Friend and I presented to the Prime Minister at No. 10 a petition from the two constituencies asking for action to be taken. I understand that it is in the gift of No. 10 as to whether the Government will make a statement. I do not know whether the Minister will disclose that decision to us today, but I hope that the petition that we submitted will contribute to a positive answer from No. 10 very shortly.
I wish to give the House a brief illustration of how pervasive nuisance calls are. During the conference season, I was away from home for five days. When I returned, my answer machine had 17 calls on it. On examination, 16 of them were nuisance calls—silent and pre-recorded calls. Some had a calling line identification, but universally, if there was CLI, it was a spoof or incorrect. Half those 16 calls were silent, and I can well understand that for people more vulnerable than I am, such as older people for whom the telephone is still something of a new contraption, such calls must be a really frightening experience. The Minister needs to take account of the evidence that exists, both anecdotal and in surveys.
The all-party group’s report—I perhaps should declare that I was a member of the working party that produced it—said that, looking at all the evidence, there could not be fewer than 1 billion nuisance phone calls each year. My hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh West cited another figure: according to the evidence that we received, 1 million people are employed in call centres. Taking those figures together, it means that each call centre operative makes 1,000 nuisance calls a year, which is a very small number—20 a week. I cannot believe that any call centre employs people to make only 20 calls a week, which prompts the question of whether that figure of 1 billion nuisance calls is right and how many calls made from such centres are not described as nuisance calls but instead produce a good result.
When the group took evidence in our inquiry, I had the opportunity to speak to a representative of one of the major network operators, who offered me his estimate that at some times of day, a quarter of all the traffic carried on his network consisted of nuisance calls. I have no way of knowing the validity of that information, but it gives some idea of the industrial scale of what is going on and the impact that it can have on our constituents. It certainly has a big impact on the elderly and on my constituents, who have been keen to say so.
In case it has not already become evident to the Minister, I want to tell him that there is a huge gap between best practice and normal practice. For instance, the rulebook states that if a silent call has inadvertently been made to a number, no subsequent silent call should be made to that number for another 72 hours. I do not believe for a moment that any call centre operates that 72-hour ban. It is incredible that they can, bearing in mind how many silent calls people receive on the same day, one after another. Silent calls are supposed to be not more than 3% of the total calls made by operators or call centres. It is difficult to believe that that is being complied with. If all call centres operated the 3% rule, 97% of calls would not be silent, but that is transparently not the case. The 72-hour rule and the 3% rule are not being obeyed.
Calling line identification is verging on useless. Some companies phone with no identification and some have spoof identifications. I have had endless calls on my phone from 012345, 00000 and so on. Clearly, the system is not working in that respect.
As other hon. Members have said, reporting problems is a nightmare. There is no simple system and there are multiple ways to complain. Who people phone up and what they are supposed to do depends on what kind of call they have suffered. Understandably, my constituents either do not know who they should call or have no confidence that anything will happen if they call. In evidence to the Culture, Media and Sport Committee, ICO staff said pretty much that there was little likelihood of an individual complaint resulting in any action against an operator.
Several hon. Members have mentioned problems with TPS, which is widely bypassed and ignored by those who phone up. It is certainly not effective. I am on TPS, but that did not prevent the calls I received in that conference week. Essentially, it is a commercial service run by the Direct Marketing Association that operates on the basis of trust, without any practical teeth that will produce an outcome. It is also based on extremely old-fashioned technology, which means that it takes 28 days for the system to click and become effective after people have registered. That does not help large numbers of people, even assuming that the system works properly when it is activated.
By way of conclusion, I want Government action. I want to see the action plan in spring—in civil service terminology, it is due shortly. When I was a Minister, I once asked for the definition of “shortly”. It took the civil servants several minutes to get over the laughter. I would enjoy hearing from the Minister, when he responds to the debate, when we can expect the action plan.
Sir Andrew Stunell
The Minister, for whom I have the greatest respect, has been sucked into the machine to an even greater extent than I had feared.
I hope that, when we have the action plan, the Minister will say something about bringing the regulators together. The all-party group report makes the point that we could waste quite a lot of time physically uniting them in one organisation, but we need a joined-up regulatory system, with all the sources of information going into one place and with one group of people looking at whether there is a pattern in an area of activity so that we do not have the current fragmentation at the operating end of the regulatory system.
I want the Government to say that the CLI service should be provided by all operators for free. I also want the Minister to say that Ofcom will be permitted to allow the blocking of rogue numbers by telecoms firms. That seems to me to be how to teach those people a lesson. The industry can get TPS working properly and quickly. There does not seem to be any reason why some of the better technological solutions should not be in place very quickly and working well. We also need a short code that will allow consumers—my constituents—to report nuisance calls of all kinds very quickly.
I think that the Minister has got my point. I press him to go well beyond good intentions and to give us some serious delivery on a nagging problem that is driving my constituents mad. They are getting irritated; they are disturbed and angry. Some of them are vulnerable, and they are looking to this House and this Government to do something to relieve their concerns.