A green energy company which plagued consumers with millions of nuisance phone calls offering ‘free’ solar panels has received a record fine from a Government watchdog for “deliberately and recklessly” breaching marketing regulations.

Home Energy & Lifestyle Management Ltd (Helms), based in Glasgow, has been slapped with a £200,000 fine by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) after pestering householders with millions of automated calls on an “industrial scale”.

An ICO investigation found that Helms made over six million calls as part of a massive automated call marketing campaign offering ‘free’ solar panels. It said an organisation should have individuals’ permission – which specifically names the company concerned – in order to make automated calls, yet this was not the case.



Helms – an accredited company in the failed Government Green Deal initiative to help people make energy saving improvements to their homes – admitted it didn’t even know what the rules were.

In just over two months – from October to December 2014 – the ICO received 242 complaints from individuals. One said they were waiting for news of a terminally ill relative and couldn’t ignore the phone, feeling “powerless” against the barrage of automated calls.

The ICO’s head of enforcement, Steve Eckersley, said: “This company’s ignorance of the law is beyond belief. It didn’t even bother to find out what the rules were and its badly thought out marketing campaign made people’s lives a misery.

“The monetary penalty is for a significant amount because of the clear failings of the company, and the number of people affected by its deliberate and unlawful campaign. It should be a warning to other companies to think before they launch into a campaign.”

The investigation found that the calls were also misleading because the solar panels were not necessarily free as implied by the recorded message.

The record sanction is the latest move in a concerted crackdown by the ICO and other agencies on nuisance calls. In the last year, it has received more than 180,000 complaints about nuisance calls, up from 160,000 two years earlier.

The ICO was given new powers earlier this year to crack down on nuisance calls, but information commissioner Christopher Graham is now pressing the government to go further. He wants ministers to bring in tougher punishments for individuals who sell lists of phone numbers to cold-calling companies and in doing so breach data protection laws. At the moment the strongest punishment for unlawful disclosure of personal data is a fine from a magistrates’ court



Peter Tutton, head of policy at StepChange Debt Charity, said: “For many people nuisance calls can be dismissed as an everyday nuisance, but for others these types of unsolicited marketing calls can cause serious stress and anxiety. Today’s action is to be welcomed and should serve as a warning to firms that this kind of practice cannot continue.”

He said the UK still lags behind many other countries in how it deals with this problem and “there are a number of reforms that could help combat this ongoing issue. The Telephone Preference Service’s current ‘opt-out’ [of marketing calls] system is the lowest permitted by the European Union; firms continue to sell high-risk financial products via unsolicited marketing calls and texts; and the resources available to regulators are insufficient compared to the scale of the problem”.

