TV Licensing Origami

In 2014 TV Licensing took the radical step of ditching paper TV licences for customers renewing automatically via Direct Debit.

The move, we were told at the time, would save about £5m in costs until the end of 2016. At the time it cost the BBC almost £100m a year to administer and enforce the TV licence fee (as an aside, it cost only £82m last year so savings have clearly been made).

TV Licensing PR harlot Stephen Farmer said: "We're always looking to find savings in order to deliver better value for the licence-fee payer.

"By not issuing the annual paper licence to Direct Debit customers TV Licensing will have saved around £5m from the start of the initiative to Charter Renewal in 2016. Those customers won't require a paper licence until 2016 as we know their property is correctly licensed and their payment plans won't change until then."

Over the last few months TV Licensing has been having another big push towards paperless TV licences. In an ironic twist the BBC's revenue generation bullies have sent out millions of extra pieces of paper, most of it in expensive glossy leaflet format, promoting the virtues of going paperless.

One of the advantages of going paperless, according to TV Licensing, is that you'd be able to turn your paper TV licence into a swan. Of course you'd still need a paper TV licence to fold into the swan, so quite how it saves paper is a bit of a mystery.

It's been a slow month for TV Licensing news, as you might have noticed from the recent frequency of our articles!

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