If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

The TV License is a brilliant way of funding the BBC, and I’d always defend its continued existence.

TV Licensing, though, is a vicious set-up that mercilessly hounds innocent individuals. Every three months or so for the last two years they have been threatening me with action over the fact that I don’t have a license. And why don’t I have a license? Because I don’t have a TV. You tell them this and they go quiet for a while but then, three months later, they start again, because they will only record the fact that you don’t have a TV for three months. After that they assume that you must have bought one because, naturally, nobody could possibly live without I’m a Celebrity, Big Brother or anything on Channel 5.

They’re wrong.

The latest threatening letter arrived yesterday, and they’re getting serious this time. They’ve even changed the font to a more threatening sans serif like you’d get on a bank statement.

OFFICIAL WARNING, it says at the top, in big capitals, and underlined.

Enforcement Officers have been authorised by us to visit your address to interview you under caution in compliance with the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 or Scottish Criminal Law.

If we find that you watch or record television without a license, your statement will be the first step towards prosecution. Should you be convicted, your name will be added to our National Enforcement Database and the magistrate can impose a fine of up to £1,000.

Officers from our Enforcement Division catch 82,076 people every year.

To avoid a potential court appearance, you are strongly advised to call 0844 800 6750 now, to purchase a license.

What I really object to is the assumption not only that you must be breaking the law by buying a TV and watching it without a license (a classic case of being considered guilty until proven otherwise) but the idea that even if you don’t have a TV you’d be sufficiently weak as to be brow-beaten into buying a license just to stop them harassing you.

And what happens if you do have a TV and end up in court accused of not paying your license? Well, according to the Citizens’ Advice Bureau, even if you are convicted the court cannot demand that you pay arrears. The fine you’ll receive is also very small.

TV Licensing claims you can be fined up to £1,000, which is true, but according to this PDF from the National Audit Office, it’s often about a tenth of that amount. In its report ‘The BBC: Collecting the License Fee’ covering 2001 - 2002, it says on page 30 that:

The maximum penalty for licence fee evasion is a fine of up to £1000. The level of fine imposed in any one case is a matter for individual courts, informed by sentencing guidelines issued by the Magistrates’ Association which aim that penalties should be proportionate both to the offence and the offender, taking into account the offender’s ability to pay. We analysed data provided by the BBC on the penalties imposed by different courts across the United Kingdom. The 128,894 people convicted in 2000-01 were together fined £12,923,610 (an average of £100.26). In addition, costs were awarded totalling £5,228,791 (an average of £40.57).

So £140.83 in total. That’s about £5 more than the cost of a license.

It’s all a bit toothless, really, and even the letter’s warning that you’ll be questioned ‘in compliance with the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984′ relates more to the way in which your rights will be upheld than the trouble you’ll be in when it’s applied. It sounds scary, but the Act does a lot to preserve the rights of the citizen while being interviewed by the police, store detectives or others in an investigatory position.

I have had the TV Licensing people at the door before and they seemed singularly disinterested in coming in to have a look around. They just asked if I had a TV, I said no, and they went away. If they did want to come in, I could have refused them entry (not that I would) and they would have had to go and get a magistrate to grant them a search warrant, but even then they would have to prove reasonable grounds for suspecting that I was breaking the law by watching TV, which probably wouldn’t be satisfied solely by my absence from their database of legally addressed homes.

It’s a shame that tactics such as these tarnish the image of the BBC, which contracts out its license collection needs to third parties, who in turn send these letters.

I remain a staunch supporter of this method of funding our public broadcaster, and believe that it benefits ITV, Channel 4 and the other commercial broadcasters, too, as they don’t have to compete with the BBC for a limited pot of advertising revenue.

All the same, receiving this latest, most threatening letter yet is particularly annoying in that it came on the same day as I ordered a TV and bought a license to go with it. Any day now, they’ll be ticking the compliance box beside my name on their evil database and patting themselves on the back, convinced that their poisonous letters have bullied another individual into buying a license and that they were right about me all along.

Technorati Tags:
bbc, tv+license, tv+licensing

This entry was posted on Friday, November 30th, 2007 at 2:41 pm and is filed under Journal, Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.