Unsolicited Telephone Communications Bill [HL]

Lord Stevenson of Balmacara Excerpts

Friday 8th November 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara (Lab)]

My Lords, I, too, thank the noble Lord, Lord Selsdon, for introducing the Bill. It comes at a particularly interesting time because it comes on the back of a number of other reports and suggestions for change on this issue. I draw particular attention to the all-party group that has been set up on this issue, of which I am sure he is well aware. Reading what it has said this week, I was struck by how much it chimed with much of what the noble Lord has been saying. It has a list of 15 or 16 recommendations that seem extremely good. If the Bill is to proceed, it would be worth having a further discussion with the officers and that committee to get the benefit of where it has got to in its evidence and support.

In supporting the Bill and wishing it well, I must pick up on something my noble friend Lady Hayter suggested. There are one or two things about the existing arrangements that might be picked up in the debate and discussions, and I would welcome a further session with the noble Lord, if he is happy to do that, because, speaking in my capacity as chair of the StepChange debt charity, I have some thoughts about some of the ways in which those who market and sell financial products prey on vulnerable customers. The noble Lord does not include that in his Bill in particular, but it is an area we might explore together to see whether there is room for movement.

As the Bill is currently drafted, there might be concern about how individuals will grant consent to being on the “can be contacted” list. The essence is straightforward, but if it is to be done by a third party or through an agency such as Ofcom or the TPS, the Bill will have to deal with its rights and responsibilities. It may increase the number of unsolicited calls because being on the list would make an individual’s number available to anybody who wants it. We might have to think through the implications of that.

The downside of making the Bill very restrictive is that there might be problems for those who currently market in that way. One would have to think about how that is calibrated. It is important to recognise that denying consumers the opportunity to receive calls that they might want is an area that we might have to consider with care.

The Bill does not solve the problem that my noble friend Lady Hayter mentioned. If you are currently registered under the TPS, that does not prevent you receiving calls that originate outside the UK. This is a well known gap, and it is something that government has looked at from time to time. When the Minister replies, I hope he will say where we are on this. It is a bit useless to have a situation that prevents calls originating within the UK but does not prevent the very large number of calls that come from abroad.

The Bill does not address firms getting access to consumer lists, whether they are opt-in or opt-out. It may be worth looking again at that. On the one hand, we want to make data available for marketing purposes but, on the other, those data have a marketable value and it is not unknown for these lists to be sold for other firms to make use of them. Perhaps that is where one might want to act to stop unscrupulous firms.

There is a difficulty in the current legislation about issuing monetary penalties. We are not against monetary penalties. They are very useful, and they can be quite sizeable. They ought to be a very effective way of cleaning up this area, but unfortunately the threshold that you have to reach before you apply them is too high. It is something that the Bill could look at.

At the moment, redress is, ironically, very difficult for consumers who are receiving calls, even if they are on opt-in basis. If the caller becomes a nuisance or is acting illegally, there is no redress scheme. My noble friend Lady Hayter made a good suggestion about an ombudsperson.

One of the key problems of the current system is that the ICO and Ofcom share responsibility for regulating this area. That can be okay, but the problem of who has responsibility is compounded by the fact that the ICO is relatively short-staffed and underresourced and Ofcom has similar but different difficulties in this area. Between them, they carve up the field, but they are unable to take on the full range of responsibilities that they would like to take on. If we were to go further on this Bill, it might be worth thinking about how best to arrange the regulation.