Telephone Preference Service

The Telephone Preference Service (TPS) is a UK register of domestic telephone numbers whose users have indicated that they do not wish to receive sales and marketing telephone calls. Registration is free of charge. The service is paid for by the direct marketing industry. There is a similar service for corporate users, the Corporate Telephone Preference Service (CTPS). Similar services are available in other countries.

It is a legal requirement that companies do not make such calls to numbers registered on the TPS; however the TPS has no powers of enforcement. Enforcement is the responsibility of the Information Commissioner, which until 2012 did not have suitable legal powers to act, but in 2012 acquired the power to impose fines of up to £500,000, although enforcing the rules was not easy given the vast amounts of money that companies which flouted the rules stood to make.

The TPS is the only such register that is enforced by law in the UK. It is regulated by Ofcom and enforced by the Information Commissioners Office (ICO). It is run by the Direct Marketing Association (DMA), the organisation grouping telemarketers, on behalf of Ofcom; neither Ofcom nor the Government provide any funding.

A loophole is that telephone subscribers who have at some time consented to be called—perhaps by filling in a long-forgotten Web form years ago with a box to tick "if you don't want to receive further information", or a firm of which the subscriber is a customer—may legally be called. Calls purporting to be for "market research" are not covered.

The effectiveness of the TPS is limited. Enforcement is so lax that many organisations completely ignore it and do not check numbers. There is no control over calls from outside the UK; many of the most abusive and sometimes fraudulent calls originate from overseas. A spokesman for the Direct Marketing Association—who run the TPS—said in July 2012 that it had received a dramatic increase in complaints from telephone subscribers cold-called by telemarketing firms, and that some firms simply chose to ignore the rules. The DMA sent between 1,000-2,000 complaints to the Information Commissioner's Office each month, yet no penalty fines had been imposed in at least 18 months.

The similarly named Government Telephone Preference Scheme is quite different; it is a system used since 1952 by the General Post Office and its successor British Telecom for limiting outgoing calls from landlines if the telephone network is overloaded during an emergency; vital lines only are registered, and only they may make outgoing calls in an emergency situation.