It’s one of the most frustrating parts of having a mobile phone – cold callers interrupting your day, feeling intrusive and disrespectful of your time and coming across as push and overly eager to sell something, regardless of whether you’re actually interested.
According to available data, a typical salesperson in the UK might make between 50 and 100 cold calls daily. In 2023 alone, some 5.5 million unsolicited calls were made nationwide.
Yet it is one popular seaside city that has been given the unfortunate title of the UK’s cold-calling capital.
In the last decade, Brighton’s elderly population and vulnerable residents have been plagued by nuisance callers as cheap rents attracted an influx of legitimate call centre companies.
However, amongst them hid rogue operators who bombarded the older generation with sales pitches.
According to The Telegraph, more than 60,000 complaints of nuisance calls are made to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) each year.
The unfavourable nickname has resulted in a dramatic downshift in Brighton’s reputation, a city famed for its Victorian pier, attractive pebble beaches, vibrant cultural scene and easy access from London. In 2024, around 11.5 million people visited Brighton and Hove, The Independent reported.
In a bid to reverse the damning reputation, John Peerless, from Brighton’s trading standards office has been working tirelessly since 2014 against 40 cold-calling companies.
“The irony wasn’t lost on anyone involved. They were making cold calls to sell a product to prevent cold calls,” he told The Telegraph.
“Since then we’ve seen a regular change in the product that is being pushed. We’ve gone from Sky warranty, to call blockers to getting your council tax reduced, and then more latterly domestic appliance cover.”
In 2019, the Evening Standard reported that as many as 500 call centres had been set up to cold-call customers of Domestic & General (D&G), an appliance warranty giant. Most of them appeared to be in Brighton and the South Coast area.
The company spent the last seven years fighting conmen who harassed their clients to change or renew their contracts. This culminated in D&G being ruled in favour of 10 out of 11 companies accused of fraudulent misrepresentation. One of the companies, Apex Assure, made more than two million calls to customers in 2021.
One unfortunate victim said: “They were such fast-talking, hard-hitting people, that we were both totally and utterly worn out by the time they’d finished.”
Another added: “They could very, very easily talk somebody into something they didn’t want to do.”
In 2016, the ICO handed out an eyewatering fine of £350,000 to Prodial Ltd, also based in Brighton, which made a staggering 46 million calls. More than 1,000 people complained to the ICO, with one person saying they felt “helpless” to prevent the calls, the BBC reported.
A doctor added that the volume of unsolicited calls was hindering their ability to answer the phone in an emergency, a worrying thought considering that at this time, around 11% of the population in Brighton and Hove were aged 65 or over, according to the council. This has since risen to roughly 13% of the total population.
