Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what steps the Government has taken to reduce the use of cold calling to obtain contractual agreements with pensioners.

Pension scams can have significant and devastating impacts on people’s lives. Scams can leave people to face retirement with a greatly reduced income, unable to build their pension savings back up. As well as being a nuisance, cold calling is the most common method used to initiate pension fraud. This is why the Government has taken a number of measures to tackle nuisance calls in general and ban pensions cold calling in particular.

On Monday 17 December new powers enabling company directors to be held personally liable for the nuisance calls their company makes came into force.

The Government ran a technical consultation over the summer on regulations to ban pensions cold calling and published the consultation response as a supplementary document to Budget 2018. The regulations to ban pensions cold calling were laid in Parliament on 1 November and will come into force early in the new year.

However, the Government is aware that more needs to be done to truly eradicate this problem, and continues to work with regulators and industry to put a stop to these calls.