Despite being on TPS, I feel I have to pre-sceen calls now. If the answerphone kicks in, and I’m around, I’ll see if a message is being recorded. If it’s someone I knw, I’ll pick up, but the majority of the time it’s some shyster trying to flog one of the three things that this kind of person seems keen on: insulation, solar panels, some “accident” I’ve had. Not to mention the oafs from “Windows Support Department”.

The best thing is that in a lot of times, the only name they have is my wife‘s pre married one, so they try to use that, get it wrong (it’s an Italian name, but it looks Indian/Pakistani) and I just tell them that there’s no one of that name here and hang up.

The TPS is a toothless beast (being an industry concoction, not an independent one), and clearly the ICO is no better. Why it took them six weeks to realise that there’s a problem is beyond me. Some on the committee must have friends in the industry.

It's pointless. Most of the junk calls I get patently come from outside the UK and are therefore entirely beyond the jurisdiction of any law or body the government (any flavour) may institute. This is noise to placate the simple minded. They simply cannot do anything about it. The only way to possibly mitigate the problem is for the telecoms providers to start providing (and enforcing) white listing facilities to their users and implementing their own large scale blacklisting system, the way any ISP worth their salt now does with email. Which of course they won't do, because at the end of the day they actually make money from allowing the calls to travel over their networks.

Imagine if hotmail/Outlook.com and Gmail made a small amount of cash every time you received a spam email into your inbox. Do you think they'd bother much with anti-spamming if that was the case?

1) Will they clamp down on companies using foreign firms to cold call people, bypassing TPS laws?

2) Never been an issue since we moved house and made our new number exdirectory. I think being ex directory is the key.

No, they have absolutely no way of limiting the activities of those companies. They can do so indirectly by applying laws to the UK telcos that are carrying the calls from abroad, but that's almost impossible to police and the local telcos will stage a legal rearguard action for years if they did try to impose it, as they earn significant cash from passing the calls on.


In terms of the calls coming in from abroad it doesn't matter - they have no access to the directory anyway. They are either war-dialing through number sequences or using lists of numbers obtained from various sources online. If you're ex-directory you're probably also careful which online vendors etc you give your number out too, I'd say that's more likely to be the thing that's kept you out of their line of fire until now.

I have a suspicion that having ' a telephone number' will become less relevant once a generation that has grown up with Skype and whatsapp gets to the point of owning their own homes. Someone who has never used a landline would see no reason to have one - so no number - and as whatsapp and Skype replace calls and texts on mobile, even the number on that will drop in importance. And Skype & etc allow for much better filtering of calls than your typical landline does.

I doubt we'll ever be rid of nuisance, but the providers that are growing don't have the same incentive to pass it on as our existing telcos.

We are pretty lucky, we don't get much cold calling over here. Apart from a research company calling up to do questionnaires once a year, I don't think I've had a cold call all the time I've been in Germany.