Lord Foulkes of Cumnock
Main Page: Lord Foulkes of Cumnock (Labour - Life peer)
Baroness Neville-Rolfe
Caller identification can work, and more and more phones now have that option. We have allocated £500,000 of the fund set up by the Chancellor to the National Trading Standards scams team to provide call-blocking devices to vulnerable people. Generally, we are putting more money into awareness campaigns. Nuisance calls are a blight for the elderly, and this is an area where we all need to work together to try to do something about it.
Lord Foulkes of Cumnock (Lab)
My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Seccombe, on her clairvoyance in putting down this Question so timeously, but I say to the Minister that it is not just a matter of calls from unscrupulous people and criminals, nor just a matter of calls to the elderly and vulnerable people. All of us are getting call after call, day after day, week after week, and we are getting fed up with it. What is the Minister going to do about it?
Baroness Neville-Rolfe
As the Minister, I share the noble Lord’s frustration and am gradually trying to do something about it. We have raised the fines and are changing the regulations, and the evidence from Ofcom is that the volume of unsolicited marketing calls has fallen as a result. But of course there is more that we have to do.