If you are sick and tired of hearing salesmen on the phone, your complaints will not fall on deaf ears, as a plastic windows company discovered to its cost after it was fined £50,000 for subjecting hundreds of people to unsolicited sales calls.
The company had made almost four million marketing calls in a period of less than two years, hundreds of them to members of the public who had registered with the Telephone Preference Service (TPS) as not wishing to receive such calls. It had regularly featured amongst the TPS’s top 20 most complained about companies and was hit with the £50,000 penalty by the Information Commissioner.
In dismissing the company’s appeal against that decision, the First-tier Tribunal (FTT) noted that the general picture was a sales-driven operation which ‘did as little as possible, as late as possible’ to comply with telemarketing rules and, even then, reluctantly in response to threats of legal enforcement.
Measures taken by the company to remedy its ‘serious’ and repeated breaches of the Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003 were ‘too little, too late’; some of those members of the public who received unsolicited calls would have suffered substantial distress and arguments that the financial penalty was excessive or disproportionate were wholly without merit.