Labour calls on Government to act to stop the scourge of nuisance phone calls - Onwurah
Following the revelations on Channel 4’s Dispatches programme of the extent of nuisance calls and the new figures from Which? that show one in 10 people are receiving as many as 20 cold calls a month, Chi Onwurah MP, Labour’s Shadow Minister for Culture and the Digital Economy, has written to Ed Vaizey MP calling on the Government to work with the telecommunications industry and regulators to finally bring an end to nuisance calls.
Letter to Ed Vaizey MP, the Minister of State for Culture and the Digital Economy:
Dear Ed,
I am writing to you about what you yourself described last week as the scourge of nuisance calls. It is a scourge we are not doing enough to combat.
Our national telephone network is inundated with nuisance calls, turning what should be a means of bringing us together into an instrument of mass harassment – which we pay for. People are more and more angry that their fixed, and increasingly their mobile, phone lines are being used against them. At the best it is a huge aggravation, at worse it is a doorway to financial and emotional exploitation of the vulnerable.
It needs to stop. I recognise the positive measures in the DCMS Action Plan such as raising of fines and enabling better data sharing between Ofcom and the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO). But I fear these measures will barely stem the tide, never mind reverse it.
The criminals have automated the generation of nuisance calls, and we have not automated the response. Detection, reporting, investigating and conviction of the gangs behind nuisance calls remains stuck in the last century whilst they have raced ahead. As a telecoms engineer for twenty years, who has written the software and built the circuits behind call routing, I know that much more can be done.
I believe we can end the scourge of mass nuisance calls if we can bring industry and regulators together to achieve a co-ordinated and comprehensive zero tolerance approach. I would urge you to review and reopen the Action Plan to make it fit for purpose. There are a number of new measure that could be considered, including:
1. Automated reporting of a nuisance call – for example dialling 1971 identifies the last number that called as a nuisance call to your service provider.
2. Automated identification of the caller party
3. Collation of nuisance calls – for example, more than 100 complaints and the calling number and owner could be automatically referred to Ofcom, the ICO and the police
4. Appropriate victim redress for persistence cold calls from the same organisation.
5. Automatic nuisance call pattern identification (without victims reporting though Big Data type network traffic analysis).
I will also be writing to BT Retail, Virgin Media, TalkTalk, Sky and BT Openreach, as well as Ofcom and the ICO, to challenge the regulators and industry to explain why we couldn’t take these kind of actions to put an end to the scourge of nuisance calls. At the same time, my colleague Yvonnne Fovargue, shadow Consumer Affairs Minister, will be addressing the issues around customer data and nuisance calls, including on-selling, consumer consent and consistency of consent tick boxes.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Yours sincerely,
Chi Onwurah MP
Shadow Minister for Culture and the Digital Economy
(via labourpress)
