Macmillan fesses up to last year’s ICO TPS warning

macmillanMacmillan Cancer Support has become the first charity to be fingered over the abuse of telemarketing rules after admitting it was one of the eight charities which received a letter from the Information Commissioner’s Office over a year ago, warning about their practices.
The ICO said the names of all eight charities had been submitted to the Public Administration & Constitutional Affairs Committee, which is conducting an inquiry into charity fundraising, and will soon be named and shamed on the inquiry’s webpage.
Information Commissioner Christopher Graham told the committee last week that his office had written to the eight major charities in March 2014 because it was concerned they were ignoring the TPS.
However, Macmillan insisted that at the time it reviewed its processes and contracts, and was satisfied that it was fully compliant.
Graham said the charities that received the letter appeared to have ignored the ICO and carried on with their previous practices. The ICO has since revealed charity body the Institute of Fundraising was endorsing telemarketing guidance which had been scrapped in 2013.
He told MPs: “We had drawn particularly to their attention the fact that the TPS could not be overridden except with prior consent. To the extent that one of the problems was the frequent overriding of the TPS because of this concept of warm donors and so on, that was certainly very disappointing.”

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