Financial Guidance and Claims Bill [HL]

Earl of Kinnoull Excerpts

Ping Pong (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 1st May 2018 Lords Chamber

My amendments are aimed at removing the peril of offshore cold calling. I hope that the Minister will be able to reassure us that these amendments are unnecessary or that she can accept them. I beg to move.

[The Earl of Kinnoull (CB)]

My Lords, I will comment briefly on Amendments 2A and 10A. I very much congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Sharkey, on putting them down and on making such a clear presentation of them, and I will not add very much to what he had to say.

I was looking at something that I pointed out to the House at an earlier stage in respect of the size of the asset of private pensions in Britain, when I referred the House to the Office for National Statistics report, one chapter of which is on private pension wealth. The median for someone between the age of 55 and 64 who has a private pension is to have a pot of £145,000. To put that in perspective, the average value of a house in Britain in June last year was £220,000, and Savills said that it thought that 48% of the house was financed by debt. That means that for an average person in Britain, the pot of pension is huge, and of the same order, as the value of their home. This makes it an incredibly juicy target for the bad guys.

That is why it is very important—I strongly suggest it is why people voted for the amendments when they did—that a belt-and-braces approach must be taken to frustrate the wicked designs of the bad guys. I very much hope that the Minister will be able to say that the Government will support these two amendments.

[Baroness Altmann]

My Lords, I support Amendment 10A and I hope that my noble friend will be able to accept it. Of course I welcome the Bill and the concept of a ban on cold calling but I fear, as we have expressed and the noble Lord, Lord Sharkey, in particular has pointed out, that unless we ban the use of any leads that have been obtained from cold calling we will not protect consumers.

What is cold calling? It is unsolicited, direct marketing. Companies try to approach potential customers to entice them into buying products that in most cases end up being scams and on which those customers often end up losing significant sums of money.

The legislation tends to focus on this issue from the perspective of protecting people’s information and data, but this issue of banning cold calling needs urgently to be considered from a customer perspective as one of business selling practices. That is very different from the concept of protecting someone’s data. Even if there were consent in some way to cold calling, the practice that is currently prevalent—whether from overseas or within the UK—tends not to be calling people whose numbers have been found by invading their data privacy. Very often, it is random number calling from an automated device or merely trawling through telephone directories. Even those people who sign up to the Telephone Preference Service receive cold calls.

Cold calling is effectively already banned, but what the Bill seeks to do, what noble Lords were trying to do and what this amendment would help to achieve would be more than that, because we will never effectively stop someone trying to call people. However, if we ban the business reasons for which they do so we will properly protect consumers. That leads on to my plea to my noble friend to consider this from the point of view of the selling process and the customer buying process. If we ensure that the regulators in charge of the sales process do not permit the use of data that has been obtained from an unsolicited call, in any form, as we have already done for mortgages, that would be much more likely to ensure the kind of protection that I know my noble friend and the Government wish to achieve.

I thank David Hickson from the Fair Telecoms Campaign. He has tirelessly attempted to help people understand why these things are so important. The ICO is of course responsible for enforcing compliance with data protection legislation but the regulation of business practices is undertaken by the specialist regulators. In the case of pensions, it is the FCA or the Pensions Regulator. Indeed, the FCA already prohibits unsolicited direct marketing of mortgage products. The SRA prohibits unsolicited direct marketing of claims management services by solicitors, so it is possible to stop. I urge my noble friend to consider and respond to these concerns when she makes her closing remarks.

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[Baroness Altmann]

My Lords, before the Bill passes into law, I would just like to welcome the Bill, as well as the debt respite scheme and the help for those with unsecured debt. It includes some very important measures. I thank my noble friend the Minister and the Bill team for all the hard work they have done on these measures. I thank the noble Lords, Lord Stevenson, Lord McKenzie and Lord Sharkey, the noble Baronesses, Lady Drake and Lady Kramer, and the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, who have all been so instrumental in getting this through. On this particular amendment, I am most grateful to my noble friend the Minister for listening to the concerns expressed in this House.

[The Earl of Kinnoull]

My Lords, I can be even briefer, but I want to thank particularly the Minister for living up to her commitment because, having read through the comprehensive Amendment 21, it does precisely that and I thank her.

[Baroness Buscombe]

I once again thank very much all noble Lords who have taken part in the many debates in your Lordships’ House on the Bill. We have come a long way and there has been huge consensus. We have improved the Bill, along with our honourable friends in another place, and I hope that all noble Lords can wish it well. In particular, on the future of the new body, I hope that we will know its name soon so that we can start calling it something in our future debates on this subject.