3. What progress has been made towards Wales becoming a no cold calling nation? OAQ(5)0655(FM)

Well, the zones have been set up in the majority of Welsh local authorities. We are committed to making our communities safer and I would encourage local authorities to continue to introduce ways to stop cold calling to protect the most vulnerable people in society.

I thank the First Minister for that reply. I don’t know whether he is aware of a poll that is being conducted by the debt charity called StepChange. This has discovered that 59 per cent of people report having received one cold call a week, and 8 per cent have had more than one call per day. And one of the principle concerns about this is these calls offering high-cost credit. About a third, apparently, received one of these calls every week, and one in eight has actually taken out high-cost credit with an average of £1,052 of extra borrowing taken out. This poses significant dangers for vulnerable people on low incomes, and I wonder if the First Minister can tell me what further progress the Government intends to make in the next 12 months towards ending this curse?

Well, we did provide funding in 2013 to increase the number of cold-calling zones in Wales. That’s helped to protect vulnerable people from scams. I know that some local authorities have also carried out that work. My own local authority in Bridgend, for example, ran a very successful campaign a few years ago informing people of what scams looked like—not just postal scams but online scams as well. They can be hugely believable, given the fact they will often use e-mails that look like e-mails from established companies, even though they are not. We will, of course, continue to work with the police and police and crime commissioners on issues including fraud crime.

I’m a strong and long-term supporter of no-cold-calling zones, and I’ve raised this several times in this Chamber as far too many of them target the very vulnerable, and far too many of the very vulnerable are taken advantage of. I have some very popular no-cold-calling zones in Swansea East. I’ve also noticed a growth, and I’m sure everyone else in this room has as they’ve been going around during election time, in the number of houses that say, ‘Cold callers not welcome’. I’m sure people have seen that on their travels.

What I’m asking is: what can the Welsh Government do to help increase the number and size of no-cold-calling zones? Because a lot of the no-cold-calling zones, which are very popular, tend to cover a couple of hundred houses, whereas I’d really like the whole of Swansea to be covered by it—I’m not sure if my two colleagues representing the rest of Swansea do, but certainly the whole of Swansea East covered by it, because it is a nuisance. And yet, you can’t do anything about the people coming in by e-mail, but we ought to be able to stop people banging on doors, telling someone they’ve got a loose slate and then charging them tens of thousands of pounds.

For all of us in this Chamber it’s always difficult to know whether ‘No cold calling’ means political canvassers as well. Although, I have noticed people putting on their doors ‘No canvassers’ as well as ‘No cold calling’. But it’s an important point. We will know of people who have been scammed in this way, particularly older people who feel particularly vulnerable. We do know that no-cold-calling zones have been set up in the majority of Welsh local authorities to reduce the number of cold callers, and we continue to work with local authorities to encourage them to set up more zones in the future.

Since 2005, my local authority has indeed been very proactive in ensuring the introduction of no-cold-calling zones. In fact, I was the cabinet member introducing them at the time. A joint initiative with North Wales Police and Conwy trading standards has now established over 1,300 zones, including the entire community of Trefriw. Your Government, as you say, has made several thousands of pounds available for this initiative, however 10 local authorities just haven’t bothered taking up the funding.

Ninety-three per cent of people in a survey are not wanting doorstep sellers; 60 per cent have received uninvited visits from contractors, with 25 per cent experiencing repeat calls. So, what steps—I’ll repeat—is your Government taking to ensure no-cold-calling zones are robustly implemented across the whole of Wales in order to protect our most vulnerable and those living alone from what are often bogus callers and cowboy contractors?

The first difficulty is we don’t have executive powers as a Government to enforce the zones. The Assembly does have some legislative competence, but it’s quite limited and limited to consumer protection. That means, of course, the local authorities have a particularly important role. She’s mentioned, of course, her own local authority, and we welcome the work that they have done. For those 10 local authorities that haven’t taken up the funding, it’s a matter for them, of course, to explain, and a matter to be taken up with them as to why it is that they feel that no-cold-calling zones are not appropriate for their area.