TV Licensing Fudging the Figures

"We have a 99 percent conviction rate", according to a TV Licensing PR harlot quoted in today's Sunday Express article about the (alleged) £283m cost to the BBC of TV licence evasion.

And 99 percent of TV Licensing goons have a 12 inch penis, if you start measuring from the crack of their arse. And that's just the female ones.

You see how easy it is to make totally meaningless statistics appear impressive and meaningful? The BBC and TV Licensing practise the dark art of figure-fudging on a very regular basis, particularly when it comes to exaggerating the effectiveness of their very ineffective TV licence enforcement regime.

Let's take a historical example that we find particularly amusing. Capita Court Presenter Chris Christophorou, who plies his immoral wares in the Kent area, laid on oath the following statement: "When the detector camera was pointed at the window of the Premises a positive signal was received indicating a TV receiver was in use receiving a possible broadcast with a confidence factor of 97%."

That statement no doubt sounded very convincing to the Magistrate receiving it, but if you delve a little deeper you'll notice how TV Licensing's legal wordsmiths have cleverly used the term "possible broadcast". Even if the confidence factor of a possible broadcast had been 100%, that is no evidence whatsoever that an actual broadcast was being received.

We find today's 99 percent conviction rate claim equally amusing and wholly implausible. We know, as a matter of fact, that only half of people TV Licensing claims to have evaded the TV licence fee are actually convicted of doing so.

According to BBC logic, anyone who gives a "Code 8" prosecution statement to a TV Licensing goon, is considered a TV licence evader. The recently released TV Licensing Field Performance Pack for March 2015 (read more here) indicates that there were 337,945 "Code 8"s taken in the 12 months to 31st March 2015, ergo the BBC reckons it nabbed that many TV licence evaders.

Skip forward a few pages of the same document it reveals that 174,643 people were convicted of TV licence evasion over the same 12 month period. In other words, TV Licensing only managed to secure the conviction of just under 52% of all those it accused of evading the fee. How can that be reconciled with their claimed 99% conviction rate? With great difficulty is the obvious answer.

Suppose TV Licensing was only considering those cases that actually made it as far as court - would that then support its claims of a 99% conviction rate? No it wouldn't, remains the answer. Of the 202,292 cases brought before the court there were still only 174,643 convictions. That equates to a conviction rate of just over 86%, which is still nowhere near TV Licensing's claimed conviction rate of 99%.

Remember these are TV Licensing's own figures, carelessly released by the BBC when it recently botched the redaction of a Freedom of Information disclosure document.

However much you squint and however much you play with the figures, you just can't get TV Licensing's claim of a 99% conviction rate to stack up.

We wonder why that is?! Could it be, perhaps, that TV Licensing's claims are, in the words of a well-known confectioner, pure imagination? It certainly wouldn't be the first time.

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