REGARDING Brian Derbyshire’s letter 'Phone line harassment' (August 27).

These calls are really annoying but there is a few things you can do whilst waiting for politicians to do something about it, firstly you can join the telephone preference service who will stop companies from dialling you home address.

If these companies persist you can put a claim in and receive £50 if they continue calling your number after the TPS has warned them.

There is also a similar orginisation called 'Opt out UK' that offers the same service.

But if you want to have fun with this at the expense of these companies, when you pick the phone up, tell the person at the other end who is nuisance calling you that you will go and get the person whom they have asked to speak to and leave them waiting, eventually after a few minutes they will put the phone down.

This costs these companies money, and they don’t usually call again if you employ this tactic.

If the calls keep ringing and hanging up on you visit the website 'who calls me' and you will find out who the company is that keeps making nuisance calls to your home phone number, on a number of occasions when I have found out who the companies are I have warned them that if they continue to call my number that I will bombard their website with junk mail.

On two occasions these companies have ignored my requests and I sent them hundreds of advertising emails to their customer service contact and signed them to receive regular spam emails. Carrying out this action is exactly the same as what they are doing when they bombard your home phone with calls, and is a good way of giving them a taste of their own medicine, and it is completely legal.

Steve Jones, Morris Green