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Financial Guidance and Claims Bill [HL]

My Lords, I support Amendment 10A and I hope that my noble friend will be able to accept it. Of course I welcome the Bill and the concept of a ban on cold calling but I fear, as we have expressed and the noble Lord, Lord Sharkey, in particular has pointed out, that unless we ban the use of any leads that have been obtained from cold calling we will not protect consumers.

What is cold calling? It is unsolicited, direct marketing. Companies try to approach potential customers to entice them into buying products that in most cases end up being scams and on which those customers often end up losing significant sums of money.

The legislation tends to focus on this issue from the perspective of protecting people’s information and data, but this issue of banning cold calling needs urgently to be considered from a customer perspective as one of business selling practices. That is very different from the concept of protecting someone’s data. Even if there were consent in some way to cold calling, the practice that is currently prevalent—whether from overseas or within the UK—tends not to be calling people whose numbers have been found by invading their data privacy. Very often, it is random number calling from an automated device or merely trawling through telephone directories. Even those people who sign up to the Telephone Preference Service receive cold calls.

Cold calling is effectively already banned, but what the Bill seeks to do, what noble Lords were trying to do and what this amendment would help to achieve would be more than that, because we will never effectively stop someone trying to call people. However, if we ban the business reasons for which they do so we will properly protect consumers. That leads on to my plea to my noble friend to consider this from the point of view of the selling process and the customer buying process. If we ensure that the regulators in charge of the sales process do not permit the use of data that has been obtained from an unsolicited call, in any form, as we have already done for mortgages, that would be much more likely to ensure the kind of protection that I know my noble friend and the Government wish to achieve.

I thank David Hickson from the Fair Telecoms Campaign. He has tirelessly attempted to help people understand why these things are so important. The ICO is of course responsible for enforcing compliance with data protection legislation but the regulation of business practices is undertaken by the specialist regulators. In the case of pensions, it is the FCA or the Pensions Regulator. Indeed, the FCA already prohibits unsolicited direct marketing of mortgage products. The SRA prohibits unsolicited direct marketing of claims management services by solicitors, so it is possible to stop. I urge my noble friend to consider and respond to these concerns when she makes her closing remarks.