It is insane – self destructive behaviour and it is killing your own industry.

The volume of silent calls is unacceptable. According to last year’s CM Insight’s report “Death of the Cold Call” BT receives over 112,000 queries every month from customers worried about silent calls.  These calls cause many problems for those receiving them.  The elderly can be intimidated and often believe that they are receiving malicious calls.  Those that find it difficult to get to the phone are also seriously inconvenienced by corporate nuisance calls. 

But it is not only the vulnerable that are worried by these calls.  A journalist who I spoke to recently said that she had previously been a victim of genuinely malicious stalking calls.  More recently she had received silent calls generated by predictive diallers, a frightening experience for her that was a reminder of her previous difficulties.  Even those who are aware of why they are receiving these calls are inconvenienced and irritated by them. 

Let me tell you as a politician it is often difficult to get the public engaged (if you excuse the pun) with an issue.  Not this one.  When I recently did an interview on this for BBC Wales Today I was congratulated on take up the issue by the taxi driver on the way to the studio (not unusual perhaps for a cabbie to proffer an opinion to a passenger – let alone one who is an MP) the security guard on reception, the make up artist, the producer, the cameramen and then the presenter who said her elderly mother was plagued by silent calls and did I have the TPS number.
      
This irritation has driven over 7 million customers in to joining the Telephone Preference Service – 400,000 every month.  According to a NOP poll for the DMA 37% of people registering with the TPS do so to stop silent calls.  This excludes them from all outbound calls even if their only intention was to stop the silent calls.  

The DMA Code of Conduct provides guidelines for members, and I welcome the recognition of the problem in the DMA’s action plan, but this is an utterly ineffective tool in trying to eradicate the nuisance of silent calls by telemarketers.  The level of silent calls generated by a company that is tolerated by the DMA code of conduct is unacceptable.  Even allowing 5% of all live calls to be silent calls in a 24 hour period can lead to a huge number of silent calls.  The Ofcom investigation into MKD Holdings, working on behalf of Kitchen’s Direct, showed that they made 24 million calls in a 4 month period, 11 million of which were answered, 1.5 million of which resulted in silent calls.  But even if they had complied with the DMA guidelines they would still have been able to generate 549,999 silent calls.  That’s one company, in one 4 month period, complying with the industry guidelines.  Is it any wonder that people are falling over themselves to register with TPS?