£30,000
Penalty imposed
PECR 2003
14 October 2024
Date on the register
PECR 2003
Law relied on
PECR regulation 22
Finance, insurance and credit
Sector
19 actions on the register
In one line
The ICO fined National Debt Advice Limited £30,000 on 14 October 2024 under the UK marketing rules in PECR. This is an ICO penalty, not a GDPR fine.
01The record
- Organisation named
- National Debt Advice Limited
- Action
- Monetary penalty
- Date published
- 14 October 2024
- Register year
- 2024
- Law relied on
- PECR 2003
- Provisions cited
- PECR regulation 22
- Penalty
- £30,000
- Sector on the register
- Finance, insurance and credit
- ICO register reference
- 17372
- Register status
- Published on the ICO enforcement register, 4 September 2026
- Notice documents
- 2 PDFs published by the ICO
- Sector share of register
- 19 of 216 actions (9%)
- Actions published that year
- 52
- Actions under this law
- 87
- Position on the register
- 153rd of 216, oldest first
- Published the same day
- 2 actions dated 14 October 2024
- Rank by penalty size
- 40th of 44 penalties with a published figure
- Complaints recorded
- over 4,000
- Entries for this organisation
- 2 on this register
02What happened, and where it sits
National Debt Advice Limited received an ICO monetary penalty on 14 October 2024. The Commissioner acted under the Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003, citing PECR regulation 22. A fine. The ICO issues a monetary penalty notice setting out the contravention and the sum payable. PECR is a separate instrument from the UK GDPR, so this is an ICO penalty under the marketing rules and not a GDPR fine.
The penalty is £30,000. That is the 40th largest of the 44 penalties on this register with a published figure and the 12th largest of the 13 recorded in 2024. PECR penalties are capped at £500,000, so the figure sits against that ceiling rather than the UK GDPR maximum.
The notice puts numbers on the contravention: over 4,000 complaints. Those figures are the ICO's, taken from the published notice for this action.
National Debt Advice Limited is filed under Finance, insurance and credit, which accounts for 19 of the 216 actions on the register (9%). In 2024 the ICO published 52 enforcement actions in total, 17 of them monetary penalties. 87 actions on the register name PECR 2003.
Counted from the oldest entry forward, this is the 153rd of 216 actions on the register and the 13th of 19 in Finance, insurance and credit. The ICO published 2 actions on 14 October 2024, so this one was part of a batch: Southend-on-Sea City Council (reprimand). National Debt Advice Limited appears 2 times on this register: monetary penalty on 14 October 2024 and enforcement notice on 14 October 2024. The ICO publishes 2 documents for this action, 795 KB in total: "National Debt Advice Ltd Mpn 20240919" and "Two companies fined a total of £150k after bombarding people with spam texts offering financial, debt services". They are the authority for everything on this page.
03The ICO's own account
National Debt Advice sent 129,902 unsolicited direct marketing text messages to individuals in breach of regulation 22 of PECR resulting in over 4,000 complaints to the 7726 spam reporting service. The company was fined £30,000 and issued with an enforcement notice.
The law behind this action
PECR 2003
PECR governs electronic marketing, cookies and communications-service security. It is a separate instrument from the UK GDPR: an action taken under PECR is not a GDPR fine, and the register pages here never describe it as one.
What a monetary penalty does
A fine. The ICO issues a monetary penalty notice setting out the contravention and the sum payable.
04Other entries for National Debt Advice Limited
| Organisation | Date | Action | Law | Penalty |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| National Debt Advice Limited | 14 Oct 2024 | Enforcement notice | PECR 2003 | - |
05Published the same day
| Organisation | Date | Action | Law | Penalty |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Southend-on-Sea City Council | 14 Oct 2024 | Reprimand | UK GDPR | - |
06Nearest entries on the register
| Organisation | Date | Action | Law | Penalty |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pinnacle Life Limited | 7 Mar 2024 | Monetary penalty | PECR 2003 | £80,000 |
| DPG Professional Services Ltd | 9 Nov 2023 | Monetary penalty | PECR 2003 | - |
| Digivo Media Limited | 3 Oct 2023 | Monetary penalty | PECR 2003 | £50,000 |
| MCP Online Ltd | 28 Sep 2023 | Monetary penalty | PECR 2003 | - |
| National Debt Advice Limited | 14 Oct 2024 | Enforcement notice | PECR 2003 | - |
All Finance, insurance and credit actions/All 2024 actions/The full register
07Work out an exposure of your own
Article 83 fine calculator
Estimate upper and lower tier exposure from turnover and infringement type, on the same scale the ICO works to.
How a fine is calculated
The Article 83(2) factors, the turnover caps, and how a regulator gets from a contravention to a number.
The ICO profile
How the UK regulator works post-Brexit, the £17.5M and £8.7M UK GDPR caps, and its divergence from the EU regime.
Provenance and independence
Source: ICO enforcement register (ico.org.uk/action-weve-taken/enforcement/), as published on 4 September 2026. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
GDPRFine.com is an independent tracker of ICO enforcement. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to the Information Commissioner's Office, and it uses no ICO branding. Where the ICO's own wording is reproduced it is quoted and attributed; everything else on these pages is our own summary of the published record.
The ICO's register held 222 entries on that date. 6 of them are prosecutions of named individuals, with ages and home towns in the ICO's own summary. This tracker indexes organisations, so those 6 are excluded and every count on these pages is out of 216. They remain on the ICO's own register.
An entry says what the Commissioner did on the date shown. It is not a statement about the organisation today, and the ICO can amend or remove a register entry at any time. Amounts and provisions are as published by the ICO; where the published notice does not state a figure or name a provision, these pages say so rather than filling the gap. This entry was read from the register page at https://ico.org.uk/action-weve-taken/enforcement/2024/10/national-debt-advice-limited-mpn/.
Register: ico.org.uk/action-weve-taken/enforcement/. Corrections: questions@gdprfine.com.