Scam Mailing

Debate between Andrew Bingham and George Hollingbery

Wednesday 30th January 2013 Westminster Hall

[George Hollingbery (Meon Valley) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Sheridan. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for South Derbyshire (Heather Wheeler) on securing the debate. I have worked closely with her on a number of issues, and we sat together on the Communities and Local Government Committee. She is a passionate defender of her constituents’ interests. I readily admit that my expertise in this area is not the same as hers, and I certainly will not go into the issues in such depth, but a number of my constituents have been hit by mail scams and it is important to attempt to do something about them.

According to Office of Fair Trading research, 48% of the UK population has been targeted, and 3.2 million people fall victim to scam mailings every year, particularly the most vulnerable in our society.

[Andrew Bingham (High Peak) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for South Derbyshire (Heather Wheeler) on securing this important debate. Does my hon. Friend the Member for Meon Valley (George Hollingbery) agree that it is often the elderly who are targeted and victimised by the scams? There are many different forms of what I call snail mail marketing, and the scams get lost in the middle of that. They are well hidden, and in my experience the elderly are particularly vulnerable.

[George Hollingbery]

That is plainly the case. In my experience, and my hon. Friend the Member for South Derbyshire also made this clear, it tends to be the older and less mentally robust who are scammed and are subjected to repeat versions of the same thing. Their names get on a list and they are targeted again and again.

The estimated annual cost of scam mailings to the economy is some £3.5 billion. The citizens advice bureau in Bishop’s Waltham in my constituency has brought a number of such scams to my attention, and one of them, involving missed delivery cards, caught my eye. The scam is not of the same nature as one that says, “You will send in a cheque,” or one that asks someone to send money directly back. This one is allegedly from a well-known delivery company, and it asks people to confirm that they want the delivery to be remade by calling a particular number. On the card, rather than an address from which to pick up the parcel, there is a telephone number. It turns out to be a premium rate number of a telephone company in Belize, which someone would be charged £315 for the pleasure of calling. Many of the scams are so sophisticated that they are extremely easy to fall for, especially for someone who does not get out or read the newspapers often and is not aware that such things exist. That case highlights one of the biggest challenges in stopping mail scams: the majority originate abroad, and it is nigh on impossible to prosecute or stop them as there is no UK-based business to have a go at.

There is a great deal of work taking place. Hampshire county council has concentrated on the matter, hence the involvement of my hon. Friend the Member for Romsey and Southampton North (Caroline Nokes). The council has established a special trading standards safeguarding unit, which works closely with its partner agencies to help protect vulnerable adults, provide flexible support to victims of fraud and raise awareness through information designed to educate, support and guard against further financial abuse. It has raised awareness through working closely with the media and community groups, and by drafting articles for newsletters, newspapers and generally circulated public communications. Extra training has been given to all staff in adult services and other agencies so that, for example, when staff visit a home and are greeted with a mountain of post they can consider whether the person there might be the victim of scam mailing.

Working in that way has enabled Hampshire county council and adult services to identify several chronic scam victims. This is not something that only Royal Mail or the Government can deal with; local authorities can have a positive input. The council also works closely with a local business that provides a mail and package forwarding service to consumers and businesses outside the UK. The business raised concerns with trading standards after large amounts of mail were returned to it undelivered. With that help, more than 200 envelopes full of cash and cheques from the US were discovered, which helped to end an American mailing scam. Hampshire trading standards has a good working relationship with money supply bureaux, and it highlights concerns about individuals who regularly make overseas transfers to unknown individuals or organisations. There is by no means a single point of contact or a single solution; many different hands can get involved.

I absolutely believe that the Government take the matter seriously. The Prime Minister answered a question during Prime Minister’s Question Time from my hon. Friend the Member for Romsey and Southampton North on, I think, 11 November, and he has announced a series of changes designed to get to grips with the problem. The Office of Fair Trading has invested £7.5 million to create scambuster teams and run awareness campaigns, and the Government are also in the process of creating a dedicated team within the National Crime Agency, when it is established, aimed at tackling the problem. The work is therefore ongoing, but I believe we have a responsibility to look even more closely at the matter and consider whether there is anything more that we can do to target the problem.

My hon. Friend the Member for South Derbyshire has covered many of the solutions that Hampshire county council would like to employ, but let me repeat them anyway. The council believes that we need additional protections in law to help to safeguard potential victims, and my hon. Friend the Member for Romsey and Southampton North introduced a private Member’s Bill in January 2011, which unfortunately ran out of time. For colleagues who have not seen that Bill, she argued that the police, customs officers or the National Fraud Authority should be able to intercept mail if they believe it is scam mail. The county council also believes that Royal Mail should disclose the details of potential scam victims to trading standards so that proper support can be offered to financially abused and vulnerable people.

Further questions arise: how do we stop scam mailing and not direct marketing? Can the issue more effectively be tackled by changes made by Royal Mail rather than the Government? Are there data protection issues that need to be considered? Are changes in the law required? I wonder whether it is possible to beef up the existing mail preference service, or whether Royal Mail can improve its safeguards to address the problem better. A moment or two ago, it occurred to me that it might be possible for families and/or vulnerable adults to have some sort of opt-in system, so that they give permission for their mail to be examined. That might be one of the easiest ways forward, to have a permissive regime under which potential scam victims can say, “I don’t mind my mail being looked at.”

I appreciate that this is a tough issue and one that is very difficult to resolve, but I do have some questions for the Minister. Is there a lead person in Government who is pulling together the key actions designed to address the problem better? Is the Government’s view that it is Royal Mail that needs to put a renewed emphasis on reducing the problem, or is it essentially a Home Office issue? How do we stop the problem falling between two stools in government? If there is not one person with whom responsibility sits, we run the risk of the issue being forgotten about and its dropping through the cracks in the floor.

I appreciate that this is strictly outside the Minister’s portfolio, but when the Prime Minister spoke to my hon. Friend the Member for Romsey and Southampton North about the issue back in November, he said that a team was being created at the National Crime Agency to deal with it. Is the Minister able to update us on the plans to create that dedicated team? I understand that it is not directly within her portfolio, but if she has any news I would gratefully receive it. What I do know for sure is that the message needs to go out loud and clear that scamming vulnerable people for cash is deeply cruel. There is more that we can and must do about it, and we must do it soon.

Local Government Funding

Debate between Andrew Bingham and George Hollingbery

Monday 6th December 2010 Commons Chamber

[George Hollingbery]

I absolutely understand what the hon. Lady is saying. If I remember rightly, the SIGOMA report includes a table—I think on page 4 —of the differential rates of council tax between authorities. I cannot tell her exactly what the numbers are, but the overall band D council tax charged in East Hampshire, taking in the Hampshire county council precept and the local parish precepts, is higher than in the SIGOMA authorities. There is already a disparity in the amount that local citizens pay in my part of the world towards the funding of their councils, which is taken into account in the grant settlement, as I understand it. As I mentioned in my earlier intervention—I apologise again for making it overly long, Madam Deputy Speaker—the amount for Hampshire county council reduced by £45 million between 2003-04 and this year, and it is expected to reduce by a further £20 million over the next several years.

Those are not the only sources of funding for local government—there is the business rate and council tax. The UK Statistics Authority says that 56% of local council revenues comes from the council grant. If we apply the cut that the Government propose to that 56% and look at the totality of what local government takes in, we find that the cuts amount to about 14%, or 3.3% a year. The Government have been brave and transparent in talking about the totality of cuts to the revenue grant allocations, because the cut across local government is rather less.

Furthermore, an article in the Municipal Journal from 4 November last year said that studies of Total Place had suggested that only 5% of all spending in a local area comes through democratically accountable bodies, which leaves 95% to come from central Government—funding that can continue to be spent without the cuts applying, even though there may be cuts elsewhere. Therefore, a lot of the talk that we have heard—about fire and brimstone, a cleansing across local government, and local businesses going out of business because there is no longer any money—needs to be taken in that context. Plainly, a great deal of Government money is still spent locally.

One or two points have been made about the Government not doing anything to help local businesses. Indeed, the converse point—that the cuts will have a disproportionate impact on areas with high local government employment—has also been made. The Secretary of State did not mention it, but the Chancellor has provided for national insurance contributions holidays, which are granted to small business formations and are specifically targeted on areas with high levels of employment in local government—or, indeed, in government across the board. The Government have therefore taken into account the fact that, although there will be cuts in local government, new business formation will be important. Much as many of my colleagues in the south-east would like the NIC holiday to come to the south-east, we have at least some understanding of why it is not.

I do not for a moment misunderstand the fact that anybody who loses their job faces a difficult time, particularly in the current conditions. Therefore, I take seriously the loss of employment in local government. However, it is also worth pointing out—to use the cliché—that when it comes to innovation, necessity is the mother of invention. De-ring-fencing has allowed local councils a world of flexibility to find new ways of doing things: to work differently with partners, and to take budgets that were predicated on particular activities occurring in a certain way and use them differently.

Various representations have been made to the Select Committee on Communities and Local Government, from people across the country and across many subjects, but I was particularly struck by one contribution—I think it was about Birmingham; it could have been about Manchester. [Interruption.] Opposition Members will have to forgive me—we have had many representations. Some 15 or 20 agencies were offering similar services to the local population. If we have such duplication of services in local councils—and I believe that in some of the large metropolitan boroughs we do—there are surely innovations to be made. There is money to be saved, and there are new, different ways of doing things. I commend that to local councils.

[Andrew Bingham]

For the past two or three years, the council in my constituency has shared a chief executive with Staffordshire Moorlands council, which is not only in a different county but in a different region. The councils now have a shared management team and shared services, which shows the innovative ways in which local authorities can save money and preserve local services for residents.

[George Hollingbery]

Indeed, and I will return to a couple of examples of my own in a moment.

There is a real need for local councils to work much more closely with third sector organisations in their areas. The hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Simon Hughes) has already made the point that we must not encourage councils to take the easy way out, which is to save money by cutting direct grants to local charities.