HC 636-i

Written evidence submitted by Godfrey Philbin [NTC 013]

Despite having been registered with the Telephone Preference Service for several years, in the last few months we have experienced a growing volume of nuisance calls. Although many of the calls come from overseas call centres which are beyond the reach of the TPS, many are from UK businesses which have clearly made no effort to check the TPS listing.

Most callers can be got rid of in short order (though some persist, often claiming they are "not selling anything" and are thus not covered by the TPS). The point though is that we have already been disturbed and have had to stop what we were doing (including having an afternoon nap!) to answer a call we did not want.

About three months ago we decided that the situation was so bad-averaging one or two calls per day, but occasionally five or six unwanted calls-that it was worth trying a trueCall call-blocking unit. Not cheap (about £95 from Amazon) but it has turned out to be a really worthwhile investment. We made the initial effort to tell it all the numbers from which we would expect to receive calls-a bit of a slog, but once done we needed only occasionally to add numbers to the list, and everyone on the list got through as normal.

Since we installed trueCall the number of nuisance calls we have received has dropped to zero, since none of the callers tend to persist beyond the initial request to give their name so that we can decide whether to accept the call. It has been a godsend, and has done the job which the TPS is clearly incapable of doing. While it may seem unfair to have to pay to block nuisance calls, if the TPS isn’t doing its job it seems to be the only option.

The only downside we have seen is that some calls we are happy to accept come from withheld numbers, so the caller has to go through the rigmarole of identification before being put through, but in the main this has not been too much of an inconvenience.

August 2013