Reader Letter: Allowing TV Licensing Access to Your Property

In today's post we respond to an email received from one of our readers.

Our reader writes:

Dear TV Licensing Blog,

Congratulations on having such an informative and entertaining website. As a regular subscriber to your feed, I know your advice to anyone not needing a TV licence is to ignore TV Licensing. To be frank, TV Licensing is wearing me down. I am sick and tired of getting letters from them. After years of being needlessly shouted at by aggressive red print, even putting them in the bin is proving too much of a chore. I'm wondering if I would get any respite if I allowed them in to check my property? The letters have more of an impact on my wife, who worries about the inevitable aggressive knock on the door. She thinks it would be better just to bite the bullet and prove we've got nothing to hide. What would you recommend?

Richie

TV Licensing Blog replies:

Dear Ritchie,

Thank you for your kind words and continued patronage.

Yours is a very typical situation. You do not legally require a TV licence, TV Licensing has no evidence whatsoever to suggest you do, yet it continues to harass you with monthly threatograms and occasional cold-callers.

As someone who legitimately has no need for a TV licence, you are under no legal obligation at all to assist TV Licensing. We strongly recommend that you ignore TV Licensing letters and employees completely. Do not engage in any conversation with TV Licensing, as doing so provides it with information it is not legally entitled to.

Assuming, for one fleeting moment, that you did allow TV Licensing voluntary access to your property. If it was a scrupulous goon, then there is a chance that he/she would accurately note your circumstances and pass that information up the food chain. However, experience shows that even then TV Licensing often continues to send threatograms to a property it has confirmed requires no TV licence.

If it was an unscrupulous goon, of which there are many examples mentioned on our blog, then there's no telling what they might "find" or "claim" during such a visit. We are reminded of the very interesting circumstances that Michael Shakespeare found himself in after allowing TV Licensing voluntary access to his property.

We take the view that no-one should be browbeaten into proving their innocence to TV Licensing. Our forefathers spilt blood to defend our fundamental civil rights, of which the principle of "innocent until proved guilty" features prominently. No-one should be doing TV Licensing's work for it. The onus is entirely on TV Licensing to prove any wrongdoing, not the other way around.

I have a greenhouse in my back garden. If the police came to my door and said "we noticed you have a greenhouse, so can we check you're not growing cannabis plants?" they would get short shrift.

Similarly if they knocked at my door and said "we can see you've got a car parked on the drive, so can we breathalyse you?" they'd be told to bugger off in no uncertain terms.

In reality the police would never act in such a brusque, accusatory and legally-baseless manner, yet those examples perfectly illustrate the TV Licensing mentality on a daily basis.

Of course the final decision is yours, but we stand by the mantra of ignoring the scum at TV Licensing completely.

Best of luck for the future and please be sure to tell all your friends about the TV Licensing Blog.

Peter

If you have any questions you would like answered on the TV Licensing Blog, please email us with the words "Reader Letter" in the subject line. Our email address is in the sidebar. As mentioned on the About page, we can't guarantee to respond to every email but will try our best.

Get our latest posts straight to your inbox: Enter your email address:


Delivered by FeedBurner