For the past year I have received numerous letters from the TV licencing enforcement, including a visit from an enforcement officer, followed by more letters. Except I don’t own a TV set and haven’t owned one in all the time I’ve lived here. The enforcement officer was actually made aware of this but after being clearly informed of my no-TV situation he assured me the letters would stop being sent. They haven’t, so last week I telephoned them and explained in no uncertain terms that I do not use a TV set and therefore should not have to pay for anything.
Apparently this will need to be confirmed by yet another home visit from an enforcement officer, although I was told by the call centre employee (who, in fairness, was very polite about the whole thing) that more letters will arrive in the meantime due to the automated nature of their distribution. All this is a heavy-handed and antiquated system that has no place in the current state of the broadcasting industry: things have moved on and it’s high time the licencing system did too.
In most cases the legal system operates on an innocent-until-proven-guilty basis; in the case of TV licence enforcement, it seems to be assumed that you are a criminal until one of their enforcement agents has access to your property in order to prove otherwise. The language of the letters sent is intimidating, misleading and geared towards the idea that there are only two kinds of people: licence-holders and licence evaders. The UK public are not stupid; for most people such overkill in licence enforcement is unecessary, and if they are willingly breaking the law a few bits of paper through their letterbox merely threatening legal action aren’t going to deter them.
The boastful claim that “it’s all on the database” merely states that there are records kept on who owns a licence; there’s nothing complicated about tallying this up against addresses that don’t and such discrepancies don’t tell you anything specific about who is breaking the law. Similarly the mention of detector vans with secret technology and hand-held detectors are not as widely used as we are led to believe: the use of such technology is tightly regulated and as such is rolled out as a last resort, to secure search warrants and so forth.
I’m sick to death of an ignorant and blunt instrument of an organisation blindly threatening me with legal action over a criminal offence that I haven’t even committed. The patronising posturing about high-tech detection and deliberately skewed rhetoric concerning how to pay both ignore the possibility that some law-abiding citizens are not using the services concerned so the police state-style intimidation is needless and misdirected. I don’t need to pay so should not be subjected to this.
The cost of all this makes you wonder how much money is being spent on enforcement officers scurrying around the length and breadth of the country on the off-chance that they might catch a genuine evader. Who covers the cost of this? The people who actually coughed up for a TV licence? Should this money go through the Government before reaching the organisation that it is supposed to be collected for in the first place?
Presumably on a roll from the MP expenses scandals, the media has highlighted how highly-paid some of the BBC employees are these days, which has led to questions regarding value for money of the BBC’s service to customers as a whole. Aside from the way in which the licence is enforced, it is quite markedly behind the times in terms of how broadcasting works in the twenty-first century: the options open to viewers in terms of services offered by non-BBC broadcasters make a fixed blanket fee unfair. For most subscriptions such as utility bills you are charged for what you actually consume or use; why should television viewing be exempt?
The imminent digital switchover is the ideal time to rethink how the BBC and television broadcasting is funded; online streaming to PCs and mobile phones and other broadcasting methods makes this anarchic tax more difficult and costly to enforce. If viewers and broadcasters are to get a fair deal, the financial arrangement must be better organised: paid subscription allows us to receive satellite and cable packages, the revenue for which is ploughed back into the maintenance of these services. Slapping a fee on top of this, purely for the right to plug a set into an aerial, is an historic throwback rather than a commonsense method of giving people access to the service and funding it.
Take the BBC News section of their main website, for example. It’s an informative, readable and frequently updated source of the latest headlines, including RSS feeds for those of us who want to keep up via feedreaders. Maintaining a site like this takes time and money, but it features a live feed from the (again, very good) BBC News TV channel. According to the licence regulations, there is nothing wrong with, say, downloading or streaming a previously-broadcast programme via their iPlayer site, but watching programmes as they are being broadcast does require a TV licence. Do I commit an offence by using iPlayer? No. Would I be committing an offence then if I watched the News channel online? Quite possibly.
The future of iPlayer is an important issue too: it’s a useful feature for people who missed a programme and want to catch up but is so far free to use. Unfortunately the bottom line is that news and downloading/streaming websites need financing somehow in the same way that television broadcasts have always been. Financing these services is both necessary and justified, but my problem is the way in which they are being financed; i.e. through a tax people pay for owning television sets. The end result of the current system is that people are paying for one thing and their money being partly spent on something else.
What baffles me is how this inflexible and unpopular system of financing public media broadcasting has remained in place for so long. Everything else has moved on, both in terms of technology and how people use it, and yet it’s being financed in the same way that it was when electronic appliances still used valves. Broadcasting has changed; consumption of media has changed; society has changed. I hope someone in a position of influence makes a stand about this, because if nothing else I’m fed up with getting those sodding letters.
Well, quite. My parents don’t have a television, and I remember a similar amount of hassle when I was growing up — ironically I think my Dad, who was a postman, was seconded to drive a detector van for a while. It’s a shame, because it doesn’t help the BBC’s reputation and, while the Beeb’s hardly a flawless organisation, I think it’s pretty good.
I have a suspicion that the reason it hasn’t changed is similar to the reason that they keep putting off that council-tax rebanding/reassessment exercise that’s now long overdue: if they change it in a fair manner, the kind of people who write to newspapers will get upset. But I could be wrong.
We bought a replacement tv, recently, and are now getting visits from an enforcement officer; this according to letters posted by hand; the letter informed that they will ‘call again’.
Our TV Licence is valid until the 30th November, 2010, so someone has, obviously, got their information wrong as, according to their notification, they are, apparently unaware of this. Unfortunately, I cannot deal with this until after the Bank Holiday.
Can anyone tell me who employs these so-called enforcement officers?
Thanks,
Jan.