Government urged to stop silent calls with £2m fines

Companies that make persistent silent calls should face higher fines of up to £2 million, the Communications Consumer Panel told the Government today.

The group, which advises Ofcom, was responding to the Department for Business and Skills' consultation on how to crack down on silent calls — when the phone rings but no one is there.

The Consumer Panel said consumers will only be protected when firms no longer have a financial incentive to make silent calls and urged the Government to lift maximum fines from £50,000 to £2 million.

Latest figures suggest 15 million Britons suffer silent calls from call centres every week. Telecoms watchdog Ofcom receives more than 1,000 complaints a month about them. Consumer Panel Chair Anna Bradley said: "We need action against companies that break the rules to show that silent calls will not be tolerated."

Silent calls are made by a machine called a predictive dialler, used by call centres to phone large numbers of people.

Whe the call receiver picks up the phone the predictive dialler connects them to the call centre - but if there is no operative available no one takes the call, so there is only silence down the line.