Corporate TPS is hurting the small businesses it was meant to protect

Italy, Spain, Romania, Slovakia and several other European Economic Area accession countries talked about their tough opt-in laws, which have led them to find positive new ways to gain consent in respect of database building and verification processes.

The UK has generally taken a relatively business-friendly approach to local implementation of EU data protection directives and regulations, in contrast to Italy, Spain and the eastern European accession countries, where the some of the most literal and restrictive interpretation of EU laws have taken place.

But when it came to telemarketing, the boot moved on to the other foot.

Representatives from the same countries who operate within extremely tough data privacy environments were appalled to hear of the Corporate Telephone Preference scheme -- a "do not call" list in respect of businesses -- and could not come to terms with the implication of what this would mean, were it to be implemented in their own countries.

For an administration that has prided itself as a guardian of the free market, as Her Majesty's Government purports to be; and which is determined to use its presidency of the EU during the remainder of 2005 to push through reforms that would make certain countries in the EU more competitive, this indeed seems a strange path to pursue.

That is, until you consider the effect that the small business lobby had on breathing life into CTPS. Small business owners, especially retailers, felt aggrieved that they weren't able to enjoy the same protection as consumers from telemarketing calls, which many viewed as a nuisance. Retailers maintained that cold calls routinely took them away from their service counters.

All of which makes perfect sense: no one wants to call people who think of themselves more in terms of consumer characteristics than business ones. There are more than a million micro businesses in the UK, and if some of them dislike being telemarketed to with business product and service offers, then we would wish to avoid calling them.

What is less understandable is that bigger businesses would want to prevent commercial calls from taking place. This was not the constituency that the legislation envisaged, yet there are in the region of 40,000 telephone numbers on CTPS that relate to people within companies of more than 100 employees.

Of course, there are far more registered telephone numbers that relate to small companies on the CTPS file. In this respect, it is patently working well to protect the people it set out to.

But, as a proportion of the large business universe, there are a deeply worryingly high number of telephone numbers on CTPS that relate to telephone lines in bigger organisations.

Though the legislation requires registration of telephone numbers by authorised individuals (that is authorised by a senior person responsible for the telephone network subscription), there is no validation of this at point of CTPS registration.

As a consequence, smaller businesses are finding it more difficult, and expensive, to sell to larger companies. CTPS in this respect is an overhead that favours the status quo, and bigger businesses with more sales and marketing resources and know-how.

It makes us, as an economy, that little bit less competitive and open, and inevitably adds more costs into business.

Perhaps our government should think about the indirect consequences of regulation such as this, before we go off to tell the rest of Europe how to run themselves? 

If you have an opinion on this or any other issue raised on Brand Republic, join the debate in the Forum.