– 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport
The below Parliamentary question was asked by on 2016-05-24.
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the impact of removing in April 2015 the need for the Information Commissioner’s Office to prove that substantial” damage had been caused by nuisance calls or spam text messages on the number of (1) investigations that have taken place
Baroness Neville-Rolfe
The Government has not assessed the impact of the 6 April 2015 change in threshold, relating to the Privacy and Electronic Communication Regulations (PECR).
The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) intends to conduct an assessment on the long term impact of the change to PECR in 2016-17, taking into account the result of any appeal judgements.
Since the change in threshold to PECR, there has been a significant increase in enforcement action and the level of fines issued to organisations that breach the rules. The ICO recently imposed its largest fine of £350,000, on Prodial Ltd for making over 46 million automated nuisance calls and more fines against rogue companies are in the pipeline.
The ICO has also published a list of all fines and investigations for breaches of the rules before and after the change to PECR in April 2015, this is available at:
https://ico.org.uk/action-weve-taken/enforcement/
