Government urged to stop silent calls with £2m fines

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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.