Communications regulator Ofcom is to ban repeated silent calls to the same household in the same day from early next year.

This follows more than 6000 complaints about the aggressive and customer-unfriendly marketing technique, caused by using automatic dialling equipment which abandons the call after the recipient has answered, if there is no sales person available to take it. Ofcom also want to raise the maximum fine for non-compliance from the current £50,000 to £1million, reflecting the size of the companies that have been caught making multiple silent calls.

There is a view that any silent calls give the practice of marketing a bad name and that they should be completely banned by Ofcom.