The Government has published a six week consultation on lowering the legal threshold before firms responsible for nuisance calls and texts can be hit with fines of up to £500,000.
The law currently requires the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) to prove a company caused ‘substantial damage or substantial distress’ by their conduct.
The Government wants to reduce this to causing ‘annoyance, inconvenience or anxiety’. The parallel with data protection will not be lost on SCL members.
Sajid Javid said:
‘Companies have bombarded people with unwanted marketing calls and texts, but have escaped punishment because they did not cause enough harm. Being called day after day may not be ‘substantially distressing’, but that doesn’t make it acceptable. I want to make it easier for companies to face the consequences of ignoring the law and subjecting us to calls or texts we have said we don’t want.’
Justice and Civil Liberties Minister Simon Hughes said:
‘We have already increased the level of fine available to punish rogue companies. Now we want to make it easier to stamp it out by lowering the threshold for taking action against these companies so the Information Commissioner can move more quickly and deal more firmly with those who break the law.’
Richard Lloyd, Which? executive director, and chair of the Government’s Task-force on marketing consent said:
‘Changing the rules so it’s easier for regulators to punish the companies making nuisance calls is a big step forward and a victory for the 125,000 people who supported our Calling Time campaign. Millions of us endure unwanted calls and texts every day so these new powers must be introduced as soon as possible. We look forward to the regulators using them to crack down hard on the unscrupulous firms that flout the rules.’
Information Commissioner Christopher Graham said:
‘The public clearly want to see a stop to nuisance calls and texts. We welcome this proposed change in the law which will enable the ICO to make more fines stick, sending a clear message to the spammers and scammers that the rules around cold calls and spam texts must be followed. The majority of rogue marketing firms make hundreds, rather than thousands, of calls and the nuisance is no less a nuisance for falling short of the ‘substantial’ threshold. This change means we could now target those many companies sending unwanted messages – and we think consumers would see a definite drop off in the total number of spam calls and texts.’
The consultation closes on 7 December 2014.
