Nuisance Phone Calls

Chi Onwurah Excerpts

Thursday 28th February 2013 Westminster Hall

[Chi Onwurah (Newcastle upon Tyne Central) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Havard. I congratulate the Backbench Business Committee on bringing this debate. It is reassuring to hear calls for stronger and more regulation from all hon. Members in the Chamber in this instance. I will not try to cover the excellent points already made by hon. Members from all parties about why we need better regulation.

I have two declarations of interest to make. I implemented calling line ID, as an electrical engineer, and I worked for Ofcom before first coming into the House. Those two areas correspond to the two brief points that I should like to make.

As an electrical engineer, I implemented calling line ID and the withholding of calling line ID for many business systems across Europe and the world. Calling line ID is a useful facility; we should not blame the technology. Having implemented it, and having written the code for it and looked at the bytes that carry information across telephone systems, I know that even when the calling line ID is withheld, the number is still present and is still sent. The hon. Member for Vale of Glamorgan (Alun Cairns) mentioned that it is technically possible to ensure that the numbers of those who make nuisance calls are obtained, whether through the equipment manufacturers or regulation, or a combination of both. I should like there to be an industry working group on this. The industry should be able to take relatively simple steps to ensure that the numbers of those who make these calls are recorded and are available, so that regulatory enforcement can be carried out.

I worked for Ofcom for six years before first entering Parliament. I yield to no one in my admiration for Ofcom, not even the Minister—sometimes we get quite competitive about this. Ofcom is an excellent organisation, with fine people who are highly qualified—great economists and technologists—but when it is considering what resource to spend on enforcement, it will necessarily consider the impact of the harm that it is trying to address and will look to calculate that harm in economic terms.

In this instance, Ofcom may be severely underestimating the harm that results from nuisance calls. Like many hon. Members in the Chamber, I have been contacted by constituents who suffer these calls, and I have my personal experience to go on. I registered with the TPS service, of which I was very aware, working in telecommunications, yet I receive up to 10 silent and nuisance calls every week on my fixed land line. For me, they are a nuisance and an irritation, but for those who are more vulnerable and less comfortable with technology, they can be worrying and upsetting. We may be underestimating the cost by not considering the cost to society and our economy of increasing the mistrust of technology in this regard.

We are already aware that many demographics are reluctant to go online. There are 10 million people in this country who rarely or never use the internet. Nuisance calls, together with spam and other harm, which we have considered today, increases the mistrust of technology in our society, and this represents a barrier to getting more people from particular demographics online. That is a brake on our economy. This issue can only get more important. In future, technology will become increasingly a part of our lives. We already think it is a part of our lives, and some of us already find it difficult getting away from our mobile phones and tablets, but that will increase.

It is essential that Ofcom, and the Minister and this Government, send a strong message to people throughout the country and to businesses that a person’s phone, PC or tablet is, just like their home, their castle. They should be able to be secure and unmolested. I hope that the Minister takes that message away with him.