Culture, Media and Sport CommitteeWritten evidence submitted by Trevor Neal [NTC 047]

Like many UK citizens, I have become increasingly frustrated at my inability to block these nuisance calls and texts. My comment is this, with the sophisticated technology that is now available, surely it is possible to introduce a system whereby individual subscribers can effectively block calls that they don’t wish to receive. Please see my suggestions below.

Firstly, whilst I am aware that the UK government may prefer a voluntary code of conduct rather than legislation to introduce a statutory requirement, I believe that voluntary codes often do not work and that it may be necessary to place a statutory requirement on UK organisations to comply with whatever system is introduced.

I believe that telephone subscribers should be enabled to block all unwanted calls irrespective of the purpose of the call and also the organisation that is making it. The only exception to this should be calls made by the emergency services/police.

There should be no exemption for organisations who are conducting research/surveys irrespective of the purpose or subject being researched.

There should be no exemption for organisations who are using “random dialling technology”, since technology should now enable them to screen out those who have registered that they do not wish to receive unsolicited telephone calls.

There should be no exemption for local councillors or local members of Parliament who wish to make unsolicited telephone calls.

My suggestion is as follows, the United Kingdom should introduce a system whereby organisations who wish to make unsolicited telephone calls, are required and enabled to tag or label their calls by dialling a prefix code before dialling the number(s) they wish to call. This would work in the same way as dialling 141 before dialling the telephone number you wish to call withholds your number from the call recipient. But in this case the code would label the call so that the intended recipient would be able to block it. The telephone providers should also be required to provide the facility for individual subscribers to selectively bar or block different categories of cold calls which have been labelled or tagged in the manner described above.

So for example let’s say that the system of codes would be categorised in the following way:

marketing calls should be prefixed with code 061;

calls concerning research/surveys should be prefixed with code 062;

calls from charitable organisations seeking financial contributions should be prefixed with the code 063; and

calls from local councillors or local members of Parliament should be prefixed with the code 064.

Then, individual subscribers would be given the ability to selectively block some or all of the different categories listed above by using call barring which involves keying in a code provided by the telephone service provider for the purpose of blocking the calls in question.

It goes without saying that there will need to be some form of compulsion, to ensure that the telephone service providers and the organisations who wish to make unsolicited cold calls all participate in the system. There should also be a system of monitoring compliance, together with punitive financial penalties for those organisations who do not comply.

To my mind the advantages of the system that I have outlined above are that it shouldn’t be prohibitively expensive for the system to be introduced. Also, the system as described above would give individual telephone subscribers the power to choose which calls they wish to receive or bar. I feel certain that with modern technology it is possible to introduce a system such as I describe above.

September 2013