Cold Calling Regulations

New regulations in relation to ‘cold calling’ came into force in June 2004. The regulations allow companies to block cold callers, but are they too complex to be workable?

What do the regulations deal with?

The new regulations allow companies to prevent cold callers from contacting them but do not provide guidance on how this can be carried out. Most companies do not have a cold calling handling procedure and these regulations may assist to their problem rather than solving it.

However the Information Commissioner has published guidelines on its website under the terms of the Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003. The rules allow companies to follow a practice already allowed to individuals by positively listing their telephone number with the Direct Marketing Association. Once the telephone number has been entered, any cold caller who calls the listed number will be liable to a fine of up to £5,000. 

Although this procedure is straightforward it still does not block cold callers from calling any registered number. Instead individuals and companies have urged that they want to block the cold callers completely. Some companies have listed a switchboard number which has an empty line, in the hope that it will stop people calling employees individual direct-dial numbers.

However, regardless of actively preventing cold callers recognising or dialing your number, most telesales companies have started to generate the numbers by random. For example, scanning telephone numbers ending with 001 - 999 will generate thousand for potential sales.

Further problem arise when a company does not want to block selected cold callers as in the past they have provided purchased goods/ services. The suggestion to avoid this complication is for businesses to write to each ‘cold caller’ stating that the company is on a blocked list, but is still happy to receive unsolicited calls from them.

The guidelines do not prevent callers ringing up either an individual or company and requesting for information. But the problem is that in big organisations, how does the person taking the call know that a colleague in another department has either blocked or requested the call? The simplest answer perhaps may be to just listen to the opening of the sales pitch, before deciding whether or not to put the phone down.

Should an individual or company decide to enforce the regulations on a cold caller, then companies are already allowed to take action against individual sellers. The Information Commissioner has suggested that if a cold call comes in despite being on the blocked list, the company should firstly write to the caller warning them. This is before the Information Commissioner is unlikely to be able to enforce all the minor breaches of the new law, and asks for the company or individual to decide by itself as to what procedure will be the most effective. Especially over the first two years, as this will allow others to be familiar with the new law and therefore may reduce cold calling.

However, perhaps under the Freedom of Information Act 2000, which came into force in January 2005, cold callers may re-appear.