Snooping Bill: industry has seven days to make a difference

A leading lobby group is calling on the industry to make a last gasp attempt to amend the codes of practice governing the controversial 'Snooping Bill'.

The Regulation of Investigatory Powers (RIP) Bill was passed at the end of July, but the consultation period on the codes of practice has one more week left to run.

Lobby group Eurim is worried that call centres will incur heavy costs if the regulations are unchanged.

Under existing law, call centres only have to inform customers that their calls may be monitored. The draft regulations as they stand state that call centres must obtain consent from every customer to monitor calls.

A Eurim spokesman said: "It is very important people with direct responsibility for call centres, help desks and ecommerce operations look at that consultation document and respond fast."

Mark Drew, group security manager for Norwich Union, said the government had not given the cost model enough consideration.

He told silicon.com: "If we have to gain consent from the caller, this would add anything up to 30 seconds to each call. That accumulates across a large organisation such as my own - where we receive about 30,000 calls per day. It would cost us £300 just for the telephone call costs. If you include the staff time that's involved in that, it would result in our adding perhaps 30 people to our operation. Within a year that will cost us in excess of half a million."

Eurim is drawing up a formal response on behalf of the IT industry, which it will forward to the government by the 25 August deadline. Another area of concern highlighted by the organisation is the fear that call centres will have to overhaul their interactive voice response systems altogether to alert customers to changes in the law.

The DTI consultation paper is located at http://www.dti.gov.uk/cii/lbpcondoc.htm