I live in a flat. Other than its slightly odd layout it’s a pretty normal flat with a kitchen, living room, bathroom and three bedrooms all coming off a corridor of sorts. There are no internal locks and the flat functions as a household like any others.
For some reason it’s listed on a number of databases as three flats in one building, Flat A, Flat B and Flat C. Other than getting three times more “The Occupier” junk mail it doesn’t cause any major problems. Except, that is, with regards to the TV License.
AndyZoop has a TV license because he watches TV. Because there are no internal locks on our bedroom doors this is sufficient for the whole property. However the TV Licensing people are under the impression that there are two homes, Flat B and Flat C, that are, shock horror, without a TV license.
And so every so often a couple of letters pop through the door addressed to The Present Occupier of B and C, written in the strongest of strong language that we will be visited by officers who will “interview you under caution” and that if found guilty “you could receive a maximum fie of £1000 and your name will be added to our National Enforcement Database” (whatever that is).
We’re supposed to call them on 0870 240 3210 to “avoid an appearance in court before a magistrate”, except the last time I checked 0870 was not a freephone prefix. So we haven’t. And having gone through this rigmarole a number of times in different properties with no TV I’m not inclined to do so.
It’s not that we already have a TV License legally covering the whole property that bugs me, nor that the address for this flat is listed incorrectly. It’s the manner in which these letters are written that pisses me off. Having a television is a choice and part of that choice is the requirement to buy a license. When you don’t have a television you haven’t opted out or made a choice – you simply don’t have a television. There shouldn’t be a requirement to be registered for something you never even wanted to be involved with.
You also need a license to own a firearm but I don’t think anyone ever gets threatening letters from the firearms licensing authority demanding that they prove their lack of a gun.
There’s a guilty until proven innocent thing going on here. Yes, we could write to them explaining the situation and inviting them round to check we’re not lying, but why should we? Especially when they’re treating us like criminals from the get go.
(And another thing – how do TV detector vans work exactly? Because in my experience they don’t work very well. Could the system simply be a list of properties that don’t have a license which are they badgered until they prove they don’t need one?)
Hey! Your TV license pays for my Doctor Who fix, so pony up now, will ya?
Tell you what, I’ll start watching Dutch TV and then we’ll be even. Got any good Torrent sites?
You’re in the same club as Boris Johnson (MP) as he gets those letters as well even though he doesn’t own a TV. He wrote an interesting “come on” open letter in the Telegraph to the local licensing office a couple of months ago.
Once an address is incorrectly listed in a government database you have had it. We have the wrong postal code for a house built 4 years ago. Every time we are asked for our post code (e.g. when calling NHS Direct concerning a potential wasp sting allergy reaction) we have to go through the same grilling about our address not being on the database.
As to the detector vans, I seriously doubt if they’ve been upgraded for years – the letters are a much easier way to target missing revenues.
Here is the link to Johnson’s open letter.
I am getting sick and tired of the TV licence people. I informed them in Oct/Nov 2004 that I was not watching broadcast tv and only had my tv to watch dvd’s and play my PS2. ‘Okay’, they said, ‘here is a refund’.
Now I keep getting letters similar to the ones Pete has been plagued with. I emailed them (not wanting to waste money on a stamp or on a phone call) and have now managed to get them to accept that I don’t watch broadcast tv. They are going to visit me (apparently) at which time I will tell them that if they want to ‘interview’ me or come in to my property to look at my tv they can fuck off and get a court order!
I agree with Pete on this. Why should I be forced to jump through hoops to prove i’m not watching tv? The whole tv detector van scam is just a scheme to scare people. So they can detect a tv being watched… so what. They cannot tell if it is being used to watch a dvd or BBC1 afaik. So it seem all they really do is hassle all the people on their innacurate data base who don’t have a tv licence until we get sick and tired and just buy one to get them off our backs.
But this is all thanks to the unique way that the BBC is funded so that it can bring you repeats of Only Fools and Horses and Eastenders 7 days a week. So here is a message to the wankers at the tv licence authority… “I DONT WATCH TV!”. Nope, i’m still not sure they understand.
Dave C, you don’t need a license to receive broadcast TV, you need a license to own equipment capable of received TV signals. So you probably do need one, unless you tv has been modified so you can only use it your DVD and PS2 (by removing its tuner and using the SCART socket, for example).
TV detector vans, although I haven’t seen one, can detect TVs that are been used by picking up the RF kicked out by the TV itself. They use two antennae so they can triangulate the position of the set, and they’re pretty accurate. They’ll tell you what you were watching too. Doesn’t what you’re watching though – having the TV is enough.
Pete, the building as three flats business is almost certainly down to the Post Office. They maintain the Post Office Address File (PAF) which is used by pretty much every business in the country to do that “what’s your post code, what’s your house number” address magic. If you can find the right bit of the Post Office, you can probably make that go away. Over time anyway, as not everyone updates their copy of the PAF every year. I’ve no idea why the TV licensing people come on so heavy other than, perhaps, they’re generally right. Borisesque posturing aside, a letter saying you don’t own a television should be sufficient.
Pete, I’ll look for some. I don’t have a very high opinion of Dutch TV but there have been some shows in the past few years that I missed out on that I shouldn’t have. Specifically “De Keuringsdienst van Waarden” a show about the many ways corporations bamboozle us.
The stuff that they put up on their website put me off eating chocolate, so watching it is likely to be good for your health and your wallet.
As for the licence issue: I used to feel the same way and even did without a TV for years after I moved house in 1995. Then one year, the government folded the licence payments into income tax so everyone paid for them whether they had a telly or not. Y’can’t win, might as well give up, rah rah rah.
Actually, what with the DVDs I’ve bought, the Beeb made a net profit on my Doctor Who watching.
Checkout what Wiki has to say.
So that’s what what stack of letters is about. Every month a letter from TV licensing shows up at the front door. There must be about thirty of them by now. They’re not addressed to any particular occupant so they just sit there. But there are occasionally other letters that come through. There’s a flyer that showed up last month that uses very polite language to say something about requirements for a TV license. Since I don’t have a TV, and it wasn’t addressed to me, I glanced over it and left it in the heap it was on.
So far as I know nobody has ever followed through on any of these. No visit, no phone call, no further communications. I certainly would not invite someone in to prove that I have no TV, and I can see why someone would be incensed at the more abusive letters. As Boris Johnson says, it’s enough to make one forego TV just to spite the fuckers. As if there were anything worth watching in the first instance.
Jez, this is what the tv licence sent me in reply to my email back in november 2004…
“Televisions that are used with a home computer, video game machines, video cassette player or with a DVD player must be licensed if they are ever used to receive television programme services.
As long as you de-tune the equipment and disconnect any aerial so that it doesn’t receive any transmissions then no licence is required.
If you are not receiving any broadcasts, please inform us of your full address so that we may update our records.
Yours Sincerely
Dominic de-Layen Vian
Customer Services”
I have removed the aerial (currently gathering dust in my garage, and have only the PS2, DVD and Video plugged in to it. So basically I have complied. They did not mention removal of the tuner, and in fact I would invalidate the warranty and probably make my tv unsafe to use if I went about opening the back case and removing bits.
I’m with Dave on this – de-tuning is sufficient. I think the logic being it’s quite hard to de-tune a modern telly quickly when the inspector is at the door.
Boris, bless him, starts on the right track but descends into that tedious BBC bashing the nigh-on invalidates his argument. Not having a TV does not mean you’ve boycotted the BBC – it means you’ve boycotted ALL broadcast television because it’s insidious, infantilising garbage that rots the brain.
(Except Doctor Who. That’s okay.)
“Could the system simply be a list of properties that don’t have a license which are they badgered until they prove they don’t need one?”
Mostly, yes. Remember how TV Licensing adverts used to focus on the detector vans — with a “they’re gonna find you” vibe — but now focus entirely on their database?
Retailers are required to report TV sales (and probably also rentals) to TV Licensing, so in theory they should know who has a TV but no license; but in general it seems that they assume that TV ownership is so ubiquitious that anyone without a license is probably a felon…
Thinking about it, TV Detector Vans are great. These detector vans criss-cross the city trying to triangulate the position of tv licence dodgers who, like a modern version of the secret agent behinf german lines during WW2, turn on there sets for short periods of time to watch a news broadcast before moving to another safe-house.
An epic game of cat-and-mouse, with our plucky tv licence dodging agents fighting against the overbearing state. Heck, we could make this into a tv mini series :)
Better than a TV series would be a Reality-(non)TV game, where *none* of the action takes place on screen. It could be advertised on the telly, and there might be the occasional round-up or puff piece about it just to pique people’s interest, but it remain tantalisingly out-of-view, with the action purported to be on your street, right now!
Pete wrote:
it’s insidious, infantilising garbage that rots the brain.
Just thought it worth repeating, that’s all. :)
What does the BBC do with all our money? It gets 2 BILLION a year to make shows which is more than one twentieth the funding the MOD needs to run an entire Army, Air Force and Navy with.
quite an interesting article here: ;o)
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg16021643.200.html
Wait a minute?!?!?!? The MOD gets 40 billion a year and it doesn’t make any tv programmes at all? How they hell do they get away with that? What are they doing with all that money?
They do make those cinema ads about travelling the world learning new trades and shagging on beaches. Do they count?
Craig – if you’ve ever seen a TV crew filming five minutes of a drama you’ll know where the money goes. It’s not just the BBC – the whole industry is horrendously bloated.
And though it’s becoming a broken record, it’s not “our money”. It’s license payers money. If you don’t like it, don’t pay the license.
Further to the “our money” fallacy, commercial TV is paid for by adverts, the cost of which is bundled into the products we buy meaning it’s an indirect tax like VAT only much less visible. Surely that’s more of a problem than the open and accountable TV license?
I can opt out of the TV license and not fund the BBC, but I’m constantly funding ITV, SKY and the rest. It’s an outrage!
You don’t need a TV Licence to use your TV to just watch DVDs Videos play games etc
You don’t need to remove the tuner, just disconnect the aerial and de-tune the channels so they show static
You don’t have to let any TV Licence inspector in unless the have a warrant, which they won’t get unless they have positive proof you are watching an unlicenced TV
See:
http://www.tvlicensing.biz/
and
http://www.marmalade.net/lime/
I listend to radio 4 last week (“You and Yours”.. I think) and there was a representitive of the licencing authority stating that the nasty letters DO have a considerable impact on people paying up.
Telling them you do not have a TV is absolutely NOT that effective. The rest of the item was devoted to people who were still being threatened after stating the t they had written to said authority.. including a firm of solicitors who were constantly pestered.
You and Yours in useful shock? Shame it’s no longer online. I’d like to have heard that particular moan-fest (as opposed to most of Y&Y…)
I have also had a letter from the TV Licencing authority, reminding me that I had bought a TV from Tesco and chasing me for a license.
Ok, I was with my father when HE bought one in Tescos with HIS debit card – how did they know I was there too?!! My imagination went wild – spy satellites?, evesdropping equipment installed at Tescos checkouts? – then the penny dropped – I claimed his points on MY Clubcard!!
Aaah, big brother works in mysterious ways……..
I went through a period of receiving letter after letter (two in one week).
Seeking legal remedies for harrasment on the web I came across the fact that each home has an “implied right of access”. This is to allow the post office staff, newspaper deliverer, etc. to access your letter box and doorstep without applying each time for a separate permission.
However – and this is the important bit. This can be withdrawn.
So I wrote to the TV licensing people withdrawing access to my property. This means they could never creep up to the door without committing an offence and I made it plain I would sue.
They wrote back ACCEPTING THIS (!!) and since then I have not heard another word.
This is not much use to those without a garden path – but it does help those with one!
I got a letter from TV Licensing and when I moved to a new address.
As I do not watch or listen to the BBC I asked customer services if I could opt out. They told me that licensing revenue is not used to fund the BBC which is a blatent lie, as anyone will know who has recently heard the BBC press its case in parliament to increase the licensing fee (to fund DTV implementation.)
Y’know, I’ve never understood the mentality of people who watch broadcast TV but manage to completely avoid the BBC. Do you really only watch ITV/C4 and Sky? Isn’t that mentally unhealthy?
I mean, has anyone actually watched ITV news recently?
More seriously, the license fee is a LICENSE FEE, not a subscription to the BBC. You have a license which allows you to receive broadcast television transmissions transmitted across a valuable spectrum. This money is used to maintain that network and to provide a selection of channels which are not compromised by commercial or political concerns. This is why Murdoch and the government hate the BBC so much, because the don’t and can never own it. It’s owned by the people who pay for it who have an incredible amount of control over what it does compared to other media outlets.
To summarize – license fee money goes to government, government gives funding to BBC along with sections of C4 and ITV. Yes there’s a causal link but the two operations are distinct.
Hello everyone
I have a dilemma that has to do with the tv license. I live in America, but my son is in the Airforce in England. Because of the tax he does not want to purchase a television but he does want to be able to play his playstation. Is there a monitor or adaptor that can be bought there allowing him to hook his gaming station to a monitor…thus alleviating him from the tv tax? I am trying to take care of this for his Christmas gift from me. I would appreciate any help. Thanks, and happy holidays
De-tune it so it’s not receiving broadcast channels and everything will be okay.
The TVL goes to the BBC ONLY! Not read the news recently Pete – Ch4 asking why they dont get any money considering they are a PSB also? Why was SKY News voted “News Channel of the Year 2004″ by the RTS? Because(as Peter Horocks, head of BBC News admitted, in a leaked memo)it’s the best place to get a idea of what really happening in the world..
Links backing that up please.
Hi all,
I rarely watch TV, but do like watching good films on DVD (and have an XBOX). When I moved House I decided that as I didnt watch TV anyhow I looked into the possibility of being completely legal, and contacted the licencing authority (via email).
I told them my set up (DVDs, XBOX (also to play DVDS) and 5.1 receiver setup. They confirmed that as long as I didnt watch broadcast TV (ALSO That I didnt Have a VCR or a satillite /digi Box or arial in situ or connected)or had any means of recording (including a recordable DVD etc, it was fine.
I then notified them of my exact setup and confirmed my details. They confirmed they logged my details for their records.
However within a few weeks they sent a few Warning letters, I ignored the first one. After the second I rang and explained the circumstances and that I had already notified them, and they said they would log it, and not send me any more.
I got a third, and I had to phone again, a bit annoyed, and they then confirmed that they would log it but they would send a TV Licencing Guy to check. – OK no problem as I had nothing to hide. As Im not often in, I asked if that could be arranged, they said they would just have to turn up on spec. Ok understandable.
Since then nothing. I have actually been wanting for the licencing guy to call, cos I wanted to ask him if I can connect the arial to the 5.1 receiver to get radio (TV licencing is now for ANY TV broadcast – Not radio. (Years ago it was for BBC TV and Radio only – not the case now).
Obviously I have not connected the receiver to the arial for radio, cos if someone came round it would look VERY dodgy, even though I would be totally legal and above board. (totally legal from the sense I would not be watching or receing TV Broadcasts … however having an arial plugged in, even for radio seems a grey area….. so have to do without a radio signal.
I think The whole system is becoming unworkable, as the licencing REVENUE is for BBCs use on both TV and radio and not for any other channels … hence the TV Licencing is getting to be a farce, forcing you to get a licence even if you decide to only watch say selected channels SKY, or selected channels notthing to do with the BBC. for these a licence IS required.
I do miss the occasional good programme, but my income is very tight, so currently will make do without broadcasts … and I certainly glad I am well away from the trash virtal reality shows. :-) …. but Ive watched all my DVDS numerous times now .. :-(
Try this…..
Dear TVL,
I am grossly offended that you do not believe me when I say I do not use a TV to receive TV broadcasts and now want to disturb my peace and privacy by visiting home to confirm this.
I am therefore permanently revoking the implied consent for your operatives to visit my home. Any member of your staff that does visit me will not be admitted and the Police will be called if they do not leave when requested to.
Yours…. QuarkyMark
I too have been a victim of the TV licensing authorities guilty until I can prove innocent policy.
We decided some years ago that we would not renew our TV license. This at the time was because a broken rooftop arial had prevented us from watching TV for some time, and we had started doing other things with our time, like talking and ‘other’ things :-)
We have since moved house, and continued with the ‘other’ evening activities, but last year we had a few letters comne through the post, demanding we pay our license. We duly ignored these as we have no tv arial, and the TV is not tuned to any station. Like many contributors to this forum, we use a PS2, and hire DVD’s.
Eventually two thugs (in my girlfriends words) arrived at the door, and demanded to be shown arounf the house. Apparently they were very insistent that they would not leave until that had seen around the place.
They inspected our house and were eventually happy that we did not watch TV, and completed the paperwork for this (took them some time as they are not used to finding non TV watchers).
We then thought the letters would stop, but instead the TV licensing ramped them up, regularly writing to us, stating that ‘you have recently informed us you do not have a television’
This really P***es me off, firstly as we have proved to them we are not breaking the law, secondly, as the letter states the legal requirement for needing a license as having a television, something the inspectors proved was not the case, as we have one but do not watch it.
I only wish I had been there myself when they turned up.
But if you dont watch tv, dont buy a license. Its just a shame they dont state the law more clearly.
One other thing I’m not sure of though, is that sometimes at work people watch the BBC news through the internet. What is the legal requirement?
I am sick of the TV License. It is just another stelth tax and keeps lining the pockets of crap presenters like Johnathon Ross who was reportedly paid £15 million just to STAY WITH THE BBC (plus salary).
This grubby, badly spoken man is not worth 15p of my money (unless to purchase some cleanser for his hair).
The government obviously get a kick back, which is why it is still operating and not gone the fairer way but accepting adverts. Their trailers for their crap programmes and dire soaps are long enough. What the hell is that if its not an advert.
Enough………………bring on the adverts.
The BBC dont care if a series not unsucessfull or has disasterous reviews, hey they still get their 2.8 billion a year, whatever.
Why not send round the goons and give us all a punch, at least that way its Robbery with Violence.
Oh, fuck off.
Very classy.
Seriously, anyone who thinks that scrapping the license fee and forcing the BBC to be funded by commercial means is a good idea for the social and cultural health of the country is so detached from my notion of reality that they’re not welcome to rant about it on my site.
Get you own blog.
Pete, I have not watched TV for a while (apart from the occassional news broadcast when I visit mum) so can you list what shows the BBC is providing that do enrich the cultural health of the country.
Nah, can’t be arsed. This blog post is 11 months old and I’m over it. However it does keep attracting twats who make me looks like a spelling genius.