Unblocking...?
On the face of it, this seems a good idea, but there will also have to be a procedure for unblocking a phone number that makes it back from a personal list to the central one. This means that there'll be some sort of appeals process, with maybe a timescale before the block is in place on the central list.
BT no longer have a block of numbers for Residential customers and a different block for Business customers (IIRC this ceased to be the case some time around 2011, apparently due to telecoms deregulation). When I last moved house, the number that was allocated formerly belonged to a tyre fitters - for a year I would get calls from HMRC, debt recovery companies, car leasing firms and various others chasing the former owners. Clearly they were not a very reputable company (towards the end, at least) and one might imagine that they could have been added to personal blacklists by some customers.
In the new 1571 blacklist, I'd hope that the processes around reallocating a dormant/abandoned number would also trigger a reset of any existing blocks on that number, especially given the rate at which scammers use almost disposable mobile numbers and suchlike these days.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
