- the average customer who has registered their details with TPS will only see a drop of 54% in nuisance calls over the course of a year, compared to the 95% fall in calls received by those who are registered with the Call Prevention Registry

- CPR are the only organisation with the capacity to stop unsolicited sales calls from overseas organisations – TPS has no jurisdiction outside of the UK

As the meerkat’s say…”simples”.

Of greatest concern to consumers has been the marked increase in the volume of so-called ‘silent’ calls – when the phone rings in the early hours of the morning or late at night and you pick up the receiver to hear nothing but silence. Understandably most people fear the worst, especially those who live alone and the elderly.

In fact the problem is so bad that over 17 million people in the UK have registered their telephone numbers with the Call Prevention Registry and Telephone Preference Service. And in 2008 the number of complaints made each month to the phone watchdog, Ofcom, almost tripled.

In the vast majority of cases silent and nuisance calls are not made by pranksters or potential burglars eyeing up your home. They are predominantly made by telemarketing organisations in call centres throughout the UK and overseas, some of whom use automated calling systems that can dial more telephone numbers than their available staff can deal with. And that’s when you get silent calls.

But that doesn’t stop the feelings of anxiety and dread experienced by the majority of people who receive these calls.

Our customers describe feeling ‘on edge’ each time the phone rings or ‘intimidated’ by the increasingly aggressive sales tactics used by some callers before registering their telephone numbers with us. Many more people believe that their homes are being primed for burglary which causes a significant degree of fear and anxiety, particularly among the elderly and those living alone, whilst 7 out of 10 people believe they have been victim of a phone scam.

In 2008 Ofcom fined Barclaycard £50,000 (the maximum possible) for breaching telemarketing rules. During a seven month investigation the phone regulator found Barclaycard guilty of making an excessively high volume of silent calls with consumers having no way of knowing who had called them. However, Ofcom’s action against Barclaycard represented little more than a token gesture in the fight against nuisance calls.

The phone watchdog has been widely criticised in recent years over its relaxed stance on the issue of unwanted telemarketing calls made to UK consumers. As has it’s support for the Telephone Preference Service (TPS) – an organisation operated by the Direct Marketing Association – which sells its data to the very telemarketing companies guilty of making these unacceptably high levels of nuisance calls.