To paraphrase former British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli: "there are three types of TV Licensing lies - lies, damned lies and statistics".
There is a buzz around the web at the moment about TV Licensing's claim that it visits 10,101 unlicensed properties every day. Such a statistic, if taken at face value, should surely have evaders quaking in their boots.
If you're a regular reader of the TV Licensing Blog you should know by now that nothing TV Licensing says or does can ever be taken at face value. Lies, intimidation, selectivity - they're the fundamental tenets of how the BBC's revenue generation racket operates on a daily basis.
Taking this latest statistic as an example, it might just about be possible that TV Licensing visits an average of 10,101 unlicensed properties a day. Such a feat would mean each of TV Licensing's 300 goons performing about 33 visits a day, every day, which is just about mathematically possible if they work flat out and never take a holiday.
Giving TV Licensing the benefit of the doubt on the 10,101 daily visit claim we know, as a matter of fact, that only 1-in-10 of those visits actually results in a goon obtaining a prosecution statement. TV Licensing refers to this figure as the "Code 8 strike rate". Furthermore we know, as a matter of fact, that only about half of those prosecution statements result in an actual conviction for TV licence evasion.
If we take those statistics into account, you will see the following:
- Out of the 10,101 visits made by TV Licensing on an average day, the occupiers of approximately 50 properties actually end up being convicted of TV licence evasion.
- Assuming a TV Licensing goon visits 33 unlicensed properties in a working day, that would probably result in the occupier of only one of those properties being convicted of TV licence evasion.
If TV Licensing would care to contradict our observations or comment on our methodology, then we invite it to get in touch. Clarifying the truth is never in the best interests of TV Licensing, so we don't expect to hear anything.
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3 comments:
According to the NAO:
"Of three million enforcement visits in 2015-16, around 298,000 resulted in an evader being caught. This was 18% fewer evaders than were caught in 2010-11, when only 2.7 million visits were made."
In other words, goons are working harder for less pay (commission on 'sales'). Hopefully this trend will continue.
How many unlicensed property's are there in the UK? 10,101 would equate to 60,000 a week assuming they work a 6 day week that's between 3.1 & 3.5 million visits every year. You cannot tell me that they go back after catching a person to see if they got a license after a court apperence?
The BBC claims to have a database with 32 million addresses. There are about 26 million licences in force and so there's about 6 million unlicensed addresses in the database. The BBC estimates there to be an evasion rate of 6-7% over the UK. If you believe them that would appear to be about 2 million 'evader' addresses within that 6 million unlicensed properties.
It's very likely that they would target again anyone who once gets caught up in their licensing racket.
I suspect the goons mostly go looking for easy pickings - eg. people who are using TVL payment cards to pay cash at their local shops who suddenly stop paying.
incidentally the 10,101 number is based on claimed visits by goons.
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