Silent Calls

Named: British Gas and other major firms making billions of unwanted calls every year


The companies responsible for inundating British homes with nuisance calls can be named.


British Gas alone is making marketing calls to about 4.1million homes each year Photo: PA



By Jason Lewis, Investigations editor
8:00AM GMT 03 Mar 2013

A string of firms, including major household names, are making millions of unsolicited calls to landlines each year in the hope of gaining business.
Some of the calls are silent, causing irritation, fear and confusion, particularly for the elderly and vulnerable.
Until now the scale of the problem, and the companies behind it, have been unclear. However a Sunday Telegraph investigation can disclose:
* British homes are receiving up to 3.2billion nuisance calls every year;
* Companies making the calls include British Gas; TalkTalk, a broadband provider; Homeserve, a plumbing and heating firm; and a series of companies selling everything from double glazing to financial services;
* British Gas alone is making marketing calls to about 4.1million homes each year;
* Ofcom, the communications regulator, allows silent calls as long as they exceed no more than three in every hundred calls made, opening the way for large companies to hang up on people hundreds of thousands times without breaking the law.
Marketing calls are hugely profitable for those involved in making them and their use has increased dramatically because of computer equipment which allows hundreds of numbers to be dialled at once.
These computerised diallers ring a householder’s number and are then designed to connect a member of staff in the call centre when the equipment registers that it has been answered by a person.
However, if no operator is available no one answers, causing silence at the other end of the line. Some play a message apologising for the call, others simply hang up.
MPs are increasingly concerned about the problem.
Alun Cairns, a Conservative backbencher, said: “Certain groups of people, particularly the elderly who may be at home all day, will not answer their telephone unless they recognise the number because they are so concerned about nuisance calls. Some people tell me that they are getting five or six of these sorts of calls every day.
“And when these calls are silent that causes real concern for the elderly whose first thought may be that it is someone they know who is in trouble and can’t speak or that it is someone out to frighten and intimidate them. This simply cannot be allowed to continue.”
The Sunday Telegraph can provide the most detailed analysis yet of the leading firms behind these calls.
Calls received by 20,000 households with a special answering unit attached to their telephones called trueCall, which allows people to block unwanted incoming numbers, provide a snapshot of which companies are making the most unsolicited calls.
In the past 12 months 5,000 trueCall machines were connected to the internet to send an electronic record of all calls they received to a central database, including the telephone number of the firm behind the calls and how many times it dialled individual customers.
The trueCall users were also invited to comment on who was calling them, providing further evidence of which company was involved and, over 12 months, built a “top ten” list of nuisance callers.
Our analysis highlights how British Gas, the energy company, made almost 7,000 calls to 900 of the homes using a trueCall device – more than seven calls a year to each of them. If that pattern is repeated to all UK homes, it represents 28million unsolicited calls each year.
A British Gas spokesman said: “This is a highly regulated area and we take our obligations extremely seriously. When we do call customers it is always with their permission or when we have undertaken all relevant checks to confirm consent.
“We uphold the highest standards of customer service and when calling it is to offer people information on products and services that may save them money or offer peace-of-mind, such as boiler care.”
British Gas registered the highest calls rate from a single 0800 number. But evidence suggests that other well-known firms are calling British homes as much, if not more than, the energy firm. Homeserve, TalkTalk and Npower used a series of numbers, possibly related to different call centres.
Our surveyed homes received 892 calls from Npower, 1,038 from Homeserve and 10,396 calls from TalkTalk. Although it was not possible to analyse these calls in the same way as those coming from a single number to see how many individual homes were called by the companies, it would suggest that they are calling millions every year as part of marketing campaigns.
However, most of the firms that appear to be making the greatest number of calls to consumers in our survey are not household names.
The firms included Curved Air, a telemarketing firm in Blackburn and Nationwide Energy Services, a Swansea-based firm offering ways to save on household bills. Between them, our survey suggested they called about six million homes last year.
Other companies identified included Ismart, a firm offering to pursue claims for mis-sold payment protection insurance; and DLG Surveys, which carries out consumer lifestyle surveys.
All of the firms that responded to our questions insisted that they did not break Ofcom rules and that consumers benefited from their calls.
The regulator last year imposed fines of £750,000 on Homeserve and £60,000 on Npower, for making “an excessive number of silent and abandoned calls”.
Ofcom’s investigation found that Homeserve exceeded the “abandoned call rate” on 42 occasions during the period between February 1 and March 21, 2011, resulting in an estimated 14,756 calls.
Ofcom rules forbid companies from making repeat calls within 24 hours, but Homeserve was found to have made 36,218 of these calls.
However our investigation raises significant questions over the role of Ofcom. It allows operators to “drop” 3per cent of all calls made, which can run into hundreds if not thousands of silent or incomplete calls every day.
Ofcom levied fines on the companies whose marketing campaigns involved silent calls, but refused to disclose the names of the companies which made the calls, because in both cases they had been subcontracted by household names. It means firms that hire the outsourced call centres would not know they have infringed the rules before.
Ofcom said that because it was up to the company on whose behalf the calls were made to stay within the rules it would not name them, adding that it would be “prejudicial” to the call centre firms.
A spokesman said: “It is a company’s responsibility to ensure that if a third party makes calls on its behalf, it complies with Ofcom’s rules on silent and abandoned calls. We may of course, in future, decide to investigate outsourced call centres and, if we do so, this information would be published subject to the legal restrictions on disclosure.”
TalkTalk, one of the firms under investigation by Ofcom for making excessive silent calls to consumers, has named the call centre operator that it used in the marketing campaign which is under scrutiny.
Ofcom said that it has “reasonable” proof that TalkTalk persistently broke the rules between February and March 2011 at two call centres, one in the UK and one in South Africa.
TalkTalk said that the calls were made by workers at Teleperformance in Cape Town, South Africa, after it ended a contract with the French-owned call centre operator.
Alistair Niederer, chief executive of Teleperformance UK, said: “This was a very regrettable, extremely rare incident which was the result of human error by 14 employees in South Africa, a tiny fraction of our global workforce of 135,000.”
Last night MPs called for Ofcom to change its approach. Mr Cairns said: “It is about time that the regulators remembered they are there to protect consumers rather than the commercial interests of the firms involved.”
He said that he hoped to persuade the Government to tackle the issue of nuisance calls in legislation.
Mr Cairns said that current regulations were too weak, with responsibilities divided between Ofcom and the Information Commissioner’s Office.
Mike Crockart, a Liberal Democrat MP who is setting up a House of Commons all-party committee on nuisance calls, said: “For these people the phone might be the only real contact they have with the outside world. If, every time they answer a call, they find themselves asked to answer a survey or persuaded to sign up for a service they don’t need, it makes them reluctant to answer – cutting them off from the outside world.”
Steve Smith, director of trueCall, who carried out the research, said “Older people are particularly vulnerable; they may be confused by telemarketing calls, agree to order products they don’t need, or may be taken advantage of by persistent and unscrupulous callers.”
David Hickson, of the pressure group Fair Telecoms Campaign, said: “The regulatory approach taken by Ofcom is not working. Taking years over imposing sizeable penalties on a handful of big name offenders is ineffective.
“Ofcom should take action whenever it has reasonable grounds for believing that someone is habitually engaged in activity likely to cause annoyance.”
Ofcom said that it had commissioned further research into the problem.



Top 10 numbers most blocked by trueCall users
Company. Extrapolated figure for UK calls

1. British Gas 4.1m

2. Curved Air 3.7m

3. I-smart 2.2m

4. Unknown telemarketing firm using number registered in Leeds 2 m

5. National Moneysavers 1.7m

6. Still active number previously attributed to defunct marketing firm 1st Call Connect 1.63m

7. Nationwide Energy Services 1.6m

8. DLG Surveys, known as 'Consumer lifestyles’ 1.1m

9. Loft Insulation 0.9m

10. Moorcroft debt recovery 0.3m



* Sunday Telegraph analysis based on calls made to 5,407 trueCall homes between February 15th 2012 and February 14th 2013.