We’ve been making progress in our fight against nuisance calls. And now we’re demanding the government impose tough sanctions against directors of nuisance call companies.
Update: 10/09/2018
From today, new measures mean that cold calls offering to settle personal injury claims will be banned if the recipient has not ‘opted in’ to receive them.
These changes should improve matters for those pestered by constant nuisance calls and will also hit cold-calling PPI (payment protection insurance) claims management companies.
Read more about the statement confirmed by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport (DCMS).
Tough penalities
Nuisance calls are still plaguing the vast majority of people in the UK, with 73% of people we spoke to saying they’d received an unsolicited marketing or sales call in the last month alone.
More than eight in ten people people said they felt cold calls were an intrusive interruption to their daily life.
Almost half of the people we spoke to said they felt intimidated and another two in five said they felt distressed by the unsolicited phone calls.
And it’s even discouraging us from answering the phone: almost eight in ten people said they were discouraged from picking up phone calls from unknown numbers altogether.
What if that call had been from family members, friends or other genuine sources?
Enough is enough. That’s why today we’re calling for bosses of nuisance call companies to be hit with big personal fines for not rectifying the situation.
‘They can be fined up to half a million pounds. The problem is that these individuals can get away with that by closing the company down and starting another. We want that to stop’@tweeneill from Which? speaks on the cold-call crackdown. pic.twitter.com/LfaxQTYzpi
— Good Morning Britain (@GMB) August 21, 2018
As the government’s consultation closes, we’re repeating our call for our lawmakers must step up and start slapping big fines on bosses of nuisance call firms.
We started our campaign on nuisance calls after thousands of you shared stories of being hounded by nuisance callers, giving us the drive to take on this menace by calling for action from the government.
And thanks to your unwavering involvement – more than 510,000 of you have signed our petition to end nuisance calls –the government committed to start fining nuisance call company bosses in 2016.
That commitment said company directors could be fined up £500k if their firms engaged in nuisance calls.
Flouting the law
But the government is yet to grant the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) this power, despite saying it would be in place from late 2017. So we need to keep up the pressure.
It’s time for the government to enforce their own rules across the board to offending bosses, as they’ve promised to do – it’s time for them to act.
Do cold calls disrupt your life? Do you avoid answering the phone because of them? Is the proposal to fine company bosses a good idea?
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