TV License : again

Every few months I get a letter from the TV Licensing people because I do not have a TV License. The reason I do not have a TV license is I don't have a TV, and I don't watch programmes as they are being broadcast on the computer either. So I don't need a TV License. The body which pursues people who do not have a TV license have a variety of these letters which vary in tone and level of intimidation. But the one I got today is probably the worst of them so I thought I would share it here. It reads:

Dear Sir/Madam

You have not responded to our previous letters. We want to ensure you have the information you may need before a hearing is set at your local court.

Please read the information below carefully and keep for your records. You will be allowed to take it into court with you.

Your faithfully,

Sarah Armstrong

Glasgow Enforcement Division

What to expect in court

If you are asked to appear in court, this is what you can expect to happen:

* you can appoint a lawyer to represent you, or you may represent yourself

*If you're found guilty, evidence collected during an enforcement visit to your property could be used by the court to decide the penalty for TV License evasion

*The court has the power to impose a fine of up to £1000, plus legal costs

*If your property needs a TV License, you will still need to buy one.

How to avoid a court summons

It is illegal to watch television programmes as they are being shown on TV without a TV License - no matter what device you use. The only way to stop this investigation from going any further is to do one of the following:

*Buy a TV License at www.tvlicensing.co.uk/pay or by calling 0300 790 6097. A colour license costs £145.50

*Let us know you don't need one at www.tvlicensing.co.uk/noTV or by calling 0300 790 6097. We may visit to confirm this.

Then overleaf it tells me again how to pay: how to pay in installments: what they want me to do if I don't need a license, again: that I might be eligible for a concesion if I am blind or over 74 years of age: offers to let me have this letter in braille or large print or audio, in case I am blind; or on textphone, in case I a deaf or speech impaired: and invites me to send them my details including my name and address on one of those wee computer read forms, which I should send to Bristol.

The fact is these people have absolutely no right to enter my home without invitation. They suggest they can take me to court with absolutely no evidence at all that I have committed an offence. They threaten dire costs which I can only avoid by engaging with them: and even if I cooperate with that they will only stop writing to me for a fixed period before the whole thing starts up again.

The TV Licensing people are very proud of their success in dealing with this. They issued a press release which stated that 400.000 people were caught watching TV without a license in the UK in the last 12 months. Due to their very strict enforcement, however, the number of criminals is low by international standards and they say that 95% of homes in this country are correctly licensed, beaten only by Austria at 3% and much better than worst case Poland, where 65% of people evade the license fee.

www.tvlicensing.co.uk/about/media-c...t-in-uk-NEWS64/

Hurrah for them, you might say. But I don't because I do not think those figures are honest. They are distorted in a very familiar way I suspect. When the DWP reports its figures for benefits fraud they do some fancy dancing: they do not record successful prosecutions, as you would expect. Instead they make estimates of people they have not caught, and report those estimates as if they were real. This serves to fuel public indignation and is very handy for the governments who want to demonise the poor.

Why do I think that the same process is going on here? Well one reason is this report from the Daily Mail

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-21...ourt-cases.html

You will note that 140,000 people were convicted in the 12 months to March 2012. 140,000 is not 400,000 or anything near it. But a tv license applies to a house not an individual: so they probably just multiplied by an arbitrary number to make their figures look better: or maybe they counted all the people who live in each household? Who knows?

They prosecuted 164,444 people, and got convictions for 142,375 of those cases: a success rate of 86%. Impressive? When you are largely prosecuting some of the poorest and most vulnerable people in the country? Likely to be unrepresented and to have no idea what the law actually says? This is instructive


So people are convicted by default, in most cases. That does not necessarily imply they are guilty, given that the letter outlined above says they will take it to court with no evidence whatsoever: if they do that to me, and I don't go, I will be one of that number: or actually I will be three of that number, given how they inflate their success rate.

The Mail article also notes that 74 people have been jailed for non payment of the fines imposed over the last 5 years. If we are playing the estimates game I would suggest that is far fewer than the real numbers because the source is the BBC, and how would they know? I have some reason to distrust that figure because numbers are available for Northern Ireland: in 2012 the Justice Minister told the Northern Ireland assembly that
.

www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/loc...t-28715120.html

And that is just in Northern Ireland: 10 times the figure quoted for the whole of England and Wales per year. I see no reason why those in Northern Ireland would be so much more likely to find themselves in that position. There are 1.7 million people in Northern Ireland and 56 million in england and wales. So let us suppose that they are equally likely to be jailed. That would be about 5000 people a year. Prison is said to cost about £47,000 per year for each inmate. Let us further suppose that each person jailed does two weeks: the cost is then about £9 million a year. Total fines imposed on 2010 were about £25 million so I think we have to net that off, do we not?

According the TV Licensing there were 25 million licenses in force in 2010 and there were 26.8 million domestic households which had a TV. That figure does not include businesses which are required to have one so is an understimate of how many should have license: but in any case the estimate comes from the audience research people. So it seems that there are 1.8 million households who happily tell audience researchers what they are watching, but who do not have a license to watch TV. Does that seem likely to you? I wonder what the estimate of congenital idiocy is, as a percentage of the population.

The BBC accounts repeat the figure of 5% estimated evasion but they do not say where it comes from, that I can find. But it seems to me that if they prosecuted and convicted about 142,000 people, and 25 million licenses were in force something is wrong with that figure.

TVLicensing has, not surprisingly, been contracted out to the private sector and is primarily done by Capita, which has its fingers in many lucrative public service pies. According to the accounts collection costs are 3.4% of the total license fee income (Income in 2011 was £3.5 billion and the cost of collecting the fees was £123 million). So we paid £123 million pounds to collect £25 million in fines, less £9 million in the costs of imprisonment plus the fees collected after prosecution of about £21 million. Pay £123 million and get £37 million. Good deal! I presume we make up the shortfall through an estimate of "deterrence" effects? And of course the indirect costs, such as prison and the associated costs of child care for the women who go to jail and are therefore unable to look after their children, do not appear on the face of the BBC's accounts. Like other institutions it is required to pretend it is a business and not a public service: so the associated costs just disappear. But even given that it still does not look like a sensible way of going about things, to me

You don't pay a separate fee to get the BBC: you get a license to watch TV as it is broadcast - any TV. That is because the BBC does not carry adverts and originally there was no other broadcaster so that is how it is funded. Murdoch and his whelps have long argued this is unfair and have lobbied to get rid of the license fee, or to get a share of it. They have persuaded many people, though in the past very few objected and it was just taken for granted. They didn't used to harass you like this either: there was some enforcement, and people did still end up in jail, but there was not this constant harassment. If I didn't know better I would think it was part of the strategy to get rid of the license fee: because it certainly annoys me enough to consider that briefly from time to time. But despite this, and despite the huge scandal about Jimmy Savile etc, I think the BBC is far better than commercial alternatives because I really value the radio output. And I HATE adverts.

Interestingly the BBC, like other public service bodies, is required to be run more like a business: this entails reducing the funding by freezing the license fee for years: but it also seems to entail "pseudo adverts", so now the BBC trails its own output a lot: which is also annoying. But will make it easier to privatise, presumably

http://www.itv.com/news/2017-02-27/bbc-ord...fee-collectors/

Capita are greedy and unethical in their role as license fee enforcers. Who could have imagined that???

Though I see the costs are said to have fallen from £123 m in 2013 to £58 m now, according to the report. I wonder how that happened/