The head of the Direct Marketing Authority – the body which the polices DMA membership – has offered to take up the fight against rogue cold calling firms, by working with the Telephone Preference Service to provide quick enforcement action.
DM Authority chief commissioner George Kidd believes the nature of the businesses which are the main culprits – mostly PPI claims and personal injury firms – requires a more agile approach.
He explained: “There is something of a ‘here-today: gone tomorrow’ to some of these services. This requires a non-bureaucratic and more dynamic approach from our statutory regulators at the Ministry of Justice and the Information Commissioners Office.
“We believe the Direct Marketing Commission could work with the TPS to provide complainants and businesses with a fast and effective way of dealing with the majority of the tens of thousands of complaints about cold-calling and the TPS that seem currently to end up at the ICO where resources are limited.”
Kidd made the offer of help in the latest DM Commission annual report, which also revealed that, out of 287 complaints the Commission Secretariat received, there were 53 consumer complaints and 28 business to business complaints which involved members of the DMA.
The rest – more than 200 – were complaints against non-member companies, which the organisation does not act upon. It referred these issue to other trade bodies, such as the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), Information Commissioners’ Office (ICO) and Trading Standards offices, where it could.
Ten cases were formally investigated by the Commission, and in eight of these cases the Commission decided that member companies had been in breach of the DMA Code of Practice.
