Culture, Media and Sport CommitteeWritten evidence submitted by Miles Raven [NTC 003]

Please find below my missive in respect of the silent calls we have been experiencing for the last four months.

We started receiving silent calls from a Milton Keynes number (...............) in April this year. The calls were silent and happened at various times of the day starting at roughly 6:30am. There have, however, been calls at 3:30am, 4:30am and 5:30am. When the phone is picked up it is silent and after hanging up it normally rings back. If an attempt is made to ring the number back, the number is unobtainable.

We have been registered with the TPS for as long as I can remember, we are also ex-directory; this has obviously had no impact on the unwarranted calls to our home. We are a family of three, with a nine year old son and elderly parents who may need to ring us if the need arises, so understandably if the phone does ring at an early hour we would answer it in case our elderly relatives need our help; this has had a significant impact on our family life with undue distress and sleeplessness.

Initially I contacted my phone and ISP provider, Virgin Media, to ask them to block the number. After various to’ing and fro’ing with them telling me it would take seven days, then later, 21 days to block the number and nothing happening, I received a letter from them telling me there was nothing they could do. Subsequently I rang them and they said that they didn’t have the facility to block numbers but BT do as they operate a different system!

I decided to look in to the matter further and found out that the TPS were not responsible for policing silent calls and that this was the responsibility of OFCOM, so I reported the matter through the OFCOM website, waited a day or so then rang them to find out what they would do to follow up this problem. You can therefore understand my mirth and irritation when the lady I spoke to at OFCOM told me “there was nothing they could do and I would need to change my number”!

In desperation I put the phone number in to Google to see if others were experiencing similar problems and there were a large number of complaints on bulletin boards and websites with exactly the same issues (see https://www.google.co.uk/webhp?source=search_app#sclient=psy-ab&q=01908609399&oq=01908609399&gs_l=serp.12...0.0.0.8420.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0..0.0...0.0.0..1c..15.psy-ab.Oh_As3xzQ_U&pbx=1&bav=on.2%2cor.r_qf.&fp=9a303c08cdeb5d94&biw=1241&bih=606)

This debacle of events lead me to me writing to Ms Crouch to see what she could do to help. It is an on-going problem and one that appears to be shunned by the regulatory body, OFCOM, with the responsibility for policing it.

July 2013