The BBC has just published the TV Licensing Annual Review 2016-17.
The Review, as is traditionally the case, includes all manner of "facts" and figures about how the TV licence is administered and enforced. Of course being an official BBC publication, it should be noted that it only includes the "facts" and figures they want people to know about.
The BBC's Head of Revenue Management, Pipa Doubtfire, blogged: "In the past year, TV Licensing collected a record £3.8 billion to fund BBC programmes and services and the number of licences in force reached the highest ever level of 25.8m. Alongside this, we maintained evasion at the very low level of 6 or 7 per cent, meaning around 94 per cent of homes and businesses across the UK are correctly licensed. We’ve also been able to reduce complaints by 50 per cent since 2010/11."
The key highlights for the financial year 2016-17 are as follows:
- The number of TV licences in force has risen from 25.6m to 25.8m.
- Licence fee revenue has risen by £44m to £3,787m.
- The closure of the so-called iPlayer loophole resulted in up to 83,000 extra TV licence sales, which generated an extra £12m in revenue.
- The cost of collecting the TV licence fee was £82.2m.
- TV Licensing spent £13.6m on postage costs. Remember that by the BBC's own admission more than 4 in 5 of those letters are destined for properties that do not legally need a TV licence.
- Estimates put the evasion rate at somewhere between 6-7 per cent, which means 93-94 per cent of properties are considered "correctly licensed" by TV Licensing.
- Capita TV Licensing goons caught, so they claim, 700 TV licence evaders every day. Given that Capita is about as good at maths as Diane Abbott, you should take that value with a pinch of salt.
- TV Licensing claims to have caught 256,600 evaders during the year, but we'd highlight that fewer than half of those are actually convicted of TV licence evasion.
- Almost three-quarters of TV licences are paid for by Direct Debit.
We would be very interested in the number of complaints against TV Licensing. Our suspicion is that the reason the number of complaints is down by 50 per cent (according to Doubtfire) is because TV Licensing makes complaining as arduous as possible.
You can view the full review here.
If you've found this article useful please consider using our Amazon link for your shopping or downloading our free ebook.
3 comments:
If you want a laugh, look at the section of Pipa Doubtfire's blog about "Maintaining low evasion" - it features a couple of cartoon TVL goons with big grins on their face - no doubt totting up their commission for the week.
A couple of additional things to note...
1. It's not "evasion" if you don't need a licence. Standard TVL nonsense to imply that you *need* to buy a licence and those that don't are "getting away with it". It's no more "evading" than not owning a car is "evading" car tax.
2. Pipa Doubtfire's blog comments that the change to the law requiring a licence for iPlayer netted an additional £11-12m. Didn't the BBC used to claim that they were "losing" around £150m a year by iPlayer not being licensable? It doesn't appear to have been as big a "problem" for them as they thought...
What they are less keen to say:
At last count- only 327 goons to cover the entire UK, Channel Islands and the Isle of Man.
Difficulty of goon retention because they are having to make more visits for less money.
10% evasion in Scotland (and rising)
Enforcement effectively abandoned on the Channel Islands
Post a Comment