I recently started to receive a number of sales calls at home which surprised me as I registered with TPS when I moved in a year ago. After complaining to TPS, I found that BT had deregistered my number in January by reporting it as inactive without any notice or authorization. Has anyone else heard of this practice?

It's not something that I've heard of, and it leaves me with a split opinion.

First of all, it's disturbing that BT could be taking people off who should be remaining on the list. This will be the reputation of the TPS no good whatsoever, as most consumers wouldn't ring to find out the reason and would just assume that the suppression list is useless.

On the other hand it's nice to know that a removal system is in place when a number is recycled.

Given the effort that BT have made to get people to sign up to BT privacy and the TPS list, I doubt very much that this is a deliberate attempt to reduce the number of TPS subscribers. I suspect that it's good old fashioned incompetence.

Regards,
D

I hear if you're listed as a company you have to re-register every 12 months, I presume because business change premises more often than homes?

I've actualy just finished a mini report on this very subject.

The TPS guys supplied me the number of TPS subscribers by year and then 2007 MTD. 2007 MTD was less then 2006 so I queried this and this was ther response

"We update our file on a regular basis. Both Telephone Preference service and Corporate Telephone Preference service are intended for live telephone numbers. In order to keep the file up to date we do perform regular cleansing and remove any inactive numbers from the file upon notification from British Telecom."

Since then the number of TPS (residential) subscribers has risen to above 2006 again, the actual figures are below.

2005 11246105
2006 14570837
2007 15836982 + 559518 mobiles

Has anyone got any statistics on how many residential land lines there are in the UK ? I've got 2 figures both from 2005 and the number of landlines is falling.

22600000 from the DMA
33822000 from some random website

according to the DMA 70% of all landlines are now on the TPS, pretty worrying for those of us invloved in OB dialling !

I now tell clients to expect 40%-60% of data to fail TPS.

This website has been a bit dead lately does anybody know of any similar websites/forums ?

regards