Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, what recent steps she has taken to reduce nuisance telephone calls to elderly or vulnerable residents.

We are determined to tackle the problem of nuisance calls, and have allocated £500,000 to the National Trading Standards Scams Team to provide call blocking devices to vulnerable people in all parts of the UK – England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

The devices will be rolled out nationwide over the next two years and an evaluation report will be submitted to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport on their effectiveness. This is one of a number of measures the Government are taking on to tackle this complex problem. Others included:

• Allocated a further £2 million to high-tech firms to promote the development of innovative and affordable solutions to tackle nuisance calls;
• We will be consulting on giving the Information Commissioner powers to impose Civil Monetary Penalties (CMP) of up to £500,000 to company directors for breaches of the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations 2003, in relation to direct marketing.
• We are working with Treasury on their proposals to ban direct marketing calls in connection with pensions following consultation responses to a package of measures aimed at tackling pension scams.