My Lords, if noble Lords in this House are already quite fed up with these calls, how much more so it must be for
those at home all day, or those without mobile phones, who are almost afraid to answer their landline for fear that it is going to be someone out to con them.
I will broaden this beyond callers offering high-cost credit to all those others who keep phoning us: claims management companies making offers about non-existent car crashes or mis-sold PPI and those making the blatant illegal fishing calls trying to obtain credit card details under the guise of doing marketing. We know that seven in 10 landline customers receive live marketing calls, which add up to 7.8 billion calls a year. These are unwanted calls. The Information Commissioner’s Office receives about 160,000 complaints a year about unsolicited calls and texts. MPs tell us that it fills their postbag. It is the number one complaint for Ofcom, which gets over 3,000 complaints a month. Furthermore, Ofcom’s own research shows—perhaps this is no surprise—that it is vulnerable people who are especially at risk, with a quarter of them getting as many as 10 calls a week that they know to be scams. I am even more worried by those who do not think that they are getting scam calls, because they probably are getting them but think that they are genuine, which really is frightening.
We are wondering how much longer we have to wait for action, but these two amendments are a useful first step. It has taken some time to launch the consultation for the Information Commissioner’s Office to be able to lower the bar before it can take action. Our amendment would allow us to look at who is actually doing the calling and try to stop it at that stage. The first thing that has to happen is for people to know who is calling them. If people can see the telephone number, that will help them to know whether to lift the phone. However, more importantly, in terms of helping to stamp out the practice, having the telephone number would enable complaints to be made and action to be taken. At the moment, more than half of nuisance calls arrive without caller line identification, so you do not know who is phoning you. A large number of those calls, maybe a quarter, may be from abroad. Even if the caller line identification simply said it was an international number, you would probably know that it is one that you do not want to pick up—unless you happen to have a child going round the world and phoning you up from time to time for money, which I gather happens quite a lot. Other calls say simply “number withheld”, which is what we want to put an end to.
Amendment 50A, tabled by my noble friend Lord Stevenson and me, would mandate caller line identification for non-domestic callers, with telephone operators making the facility to read that free to subscribers. When I was young, we used to have to buy a telephone answering machine, but that is now built into our telephones; so should this be, so that we can see who is phoning us. The Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee in the other place supported prohibiting the withholding of numbers for marketing calls and so did the all-party group. In moving a debate on a 10-minute rule Bill in the other House, Alun Cairns said that he supposed that this,
“could be compared to someone knocking at the door wearing a mask or a balaclava. Would we answer the door”,
in those circumstances? He then said:
“Of course we would not. Why, then, do we allow the same thing to happen over the telephone?”.—[Official Report, Commons, 28/2/13; col. 158WH.]
5 pm
In Committee, the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, said that mandatory caller line identification is not permissible under EU law. Needless to say, we have done a bit of research since then: the German telecommunications law makes it illegal to restrict or withhold the line identity when people are calling for marketing purposes; France also prohibits hidden numbers in telephone canvassing; and in Italy—the translation is a bit dodgy for this but I think we have it right—data processing operators must ensure caller line identification when they call subscribers. So there is no reason why we cannot do it here. Jo Connell, chair of the Communications Consumer Panel, strongly supports our amendment. As she says, caller line identification helps report nuisance calls to regulators as well as enabling people to block or filter calls. I look forward to what the Minister is going to say on this, as it may lift our hearts a little.