Everyone at one time or another has experienced
the frustration of cold calling. The majority of people will experience this
and in the event that it is a one off, or from various different companies,
this may be easily ignored. So what is the position where you experience
relentless calls which can be considered to be aggressive in nature? The
Protection from Harassment Act 1997 states that a person must not pursue a
course of conduct which amounts to harassment of another and which he knows or
ought to know amounts to harassment. So what is harassment? Harassment is
deliberate conduct directly against another person or other people which
attains a certain level of severity or if it is of such gravity to justify the
sanctions of criminal law.
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| Article by Lucy Walpole |
These cases are not uncommon and the courts
have recognised in Majrowski v Guy’s and Thomas’s NHS Trust [2006] that a case
for harassment, the boundary between ‘conduct which is unattractive, even
unreasonable, and conduct which is oppressive and unacceptable’ needs to be
recognised. The important point to consider with any civil claim is whether the
court is likely to take the view that the level of contact was reasonable in
the circumstances. Take for instance a client of a bank who owes money. The
judgment in the key case of Roberts v Bank of Scotland PLC [2013] provided that
the bank was entitled to contact their client to ‘seek a mutually acceptable
resolution of the problem’ but that the mere existence of a debt ‘does not give
the creditor the right to bombard the debtor with endless and repeated
telephone calls’. In this case, Ms Roberts was awarded a sum of £7,500.00 in
damages for the harassment caused as a result of repeated phone calls.
