Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what assessment she has made of the effectiveness of deterrents to prevent phone call and text message financial scams.

Fraudulent calls and texts can be particularly stressful and damaging for the most vulnerable in society and can provide a gateway to scams, with opportunistic criminals targeting potential victims.

The Government is aware we must improve our response to fraud, and we have been working with partners from law enforcement, the public and private sectors to tackle this growing threat. In February, the Economic Crime Strategic Board agreed an ambitious framework for a fraud action plan which will now be developed and will commit key partners in the public sector and industry to do more to tackle fraud.

We have also been working with Ofcom to disrupt phoneline enabled scams. Ofcom have adopted new rules relating to Call Line Identification (CLI), which means phone numbers used to perpetrate scams will be identified, filtered out and prevented from reaching the recipient. I would also highlight the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (PECR) governs unsolicited live or automated direct marketing calls and imposes strict obligations on organisations which make direct marketing calls to individuals in the UK. The ICO has the powers to impose civil monetary penalties of up to £500,000 for serious contraventions of the PECR.

Lastly, to ensure we improve the effectiveness of our response to fraud, the Home Office and the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) are in regular discussion with the telecommunication industry on ways to tackle fraud, including text messaging scams known as smishing. In 2019, the Government published a joint public-private Economic Crime Plan which commits us to work in partnership with the private sector to address the vulnerabilities which allows fraud to flourish and to share data and intelligence to better disrupt and prevent fraud. This can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/economic-crime-plan-2019-to-2022.