Are we being pestered by fewer nuisance calls?

There’s good news, but plenty of bad news too

Like many tricky questions in life, the answer to this is: yes and no. Or, to be more accurate, mostly yes, with a little bit of no.

We’ll start with the positive. Yes, it’s true that the number of nuisance calls to landlines has been falling over a period of years. In May 2017, Ofcom’s research showed that 61 per cent of people had received a nuisance call on their landline within the previous four weeks. By January 2020 that had fallen to 39 per cent: a steady if not spectacular decline.

The picture is less clear for nuisance calls to mobile phones. It peaked in May 2017, with 47 per cent of people reporting them. This had dropped to 37 per cent by January 2020, but it didn’t fall in a regular pattern. Several months saw increases, most notably in early 2018 and early 2019.

Overall though, combining landline and mobile calls, the numbers have fallen, from 58 per cent in May 2017 to a record low of 48 per cent in January 2020. That’s still a startling figure, of course. Almost half of us have been harassed recently by cold calls.

Complaints to Ofcom about nuisance calls have fallen too, though it’s not all good news. From 2015 to 2019 the number of complaints the regulator received from the public fell from 166,663 a year to 129,354. But that 2019 figure

Almost half of us have been harassed recently by cold calls

is an increase of nearly 5,000 from 2018. Ofcom says this rise was down to public awareness of GDPR laws, which came into effect in May 2018 and gave customers greater control of what data marketing companies were allowed to keep about them.

Interestingly, complaints about a specific type of nuisance call have fallen every year since 2015 – silent and abandoned calls. They peaked in 2015 at 46,648, falling to 27,869 by 2020.

Ofcom’s response to the figures is admirably measured, saying that “while it’s encouraging that progress is being made, there is still much more to do to make sure people are protected from harm”.

It’s keen to highlight efforts made to stop cold-calling companies. These include the Information Commissioner’s Office fining 13 firms in 2019, the largest being £160,000 against Clydebank company ‘Making It Easy Limited’ for making 856,769 unsolicited calls.

Ofcom itself contacted 11 companies last year asking them to explain why their cold-calling methods had generated mass complaints. This led to a drop of between 28 to 41 per cent in complaints about these firms.

But the regulator acknowledges that much more needs to be done, particularly in the battle against scam calls. It has “increased its focus” on tackling scams by supporting

Stop Scams UK, an industry group comprising policy makers, regulators, consumer groups and phone networks. They share ideas about how to stop the “rapidly changing threat” scams pose, and protect those who are being targeted.

Such effort is urgently needed because 2020 has been a bumper year for scammers. They’ve exploited the Coronavirus outbreak with sickening relish, using all their weapons to con the public: not just cold calls, but also fake adverts online, phishing emails and texts, and even door-to-door fraudsters posing as virus testers.

Ofcom says fighting Coronavirus scams is one of its priorities for the rest of 2020. We think it should be the top priority. Scammers see the pandemic as a once-in-alifetime opportunity to make their fortunes. Ofcom must make sure this doesn’t lead to a resurgence in nuisance calls.