Jim Sheridan – 2014 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Culture Media and Sport

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Jim Sheridan on 2014-06-17.

To ask the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, what assessment he has made of the effect of fines imposed by the Information Commissioner’s Office on reducing nuisance calls and texts.

Mr Edward Vaizey

No such assessment has been made, but we are aware that after ICO issued a large monetary penalty in November 2012 for spam text messages, the monitoring service Cloudmark reported a 10% drop in unsolicited spam SMS text messages. We remain keen to ensure robust enforcement of the regulations, so that companies breaking the rules are caught and penalised.

OurNuisance Calls Action Plan that was published on 30th March 2014, details the range of legislative and non-legislative measures being taken forward to tackle nuisance calls and texts and the plan can be viewed at: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/nuisance-calls-action-plan-unveiled

“