Do you pay your TV license? Course you don't. Nobody does. Particularly not the license pay vigilantes fighting the good cause - we meet them.
‘To the legal occupier,’ began the first letter. ‘We are investigating your address.’
My partner and I moved into our flat in 2019 without a TV licence. We didn’t need one, but that didn’t matter.
‘We’re giving you 10 days to get correctly licensed,’ read the next. Then: ‘Expect a visit from an enforcement officer.’ There was only one thing to do.
‘I’ll be the inspector,’ said my partner.
He cleared his throat. ‘Hello, this is TV Licensing. Are you the occupier?’
‘Sorry, you can’t come in.’
‘Say you don’t feel safe,’ he suggested. ‘There’s nothing they can say to that.’
Since then, the letters have advanced through their full cycle, like the changing of the seasons. Investigation opened. Get a licence. Expect a visit. The visit still hasn’t happened.
First, some context. TV licences, which cost £159 per year, are needed to watch live TV and use BBC iPlayer. The BBC issues them, but TV Licensing is a trademark and most admin is outsourced to Capita. As Peter Jones, who runs an anti-TV Licensing blog, explains: ‘The BBC gets good mileage out of pretending TV Licensing is a completely different entity, but they are two cheeks of the same arse.’
TV Licensing, with its aggressive letters, is the thumb of the state bearing down on its subjects. And it touches a often-suppressed desire to wriggle free. It makes warriors out of sane, law-abiding people, who will compete over how many letters they have amassed, wage great wars for tiny victories. How far will they go?
TV Licensing spark fear and uncertainty, even among people who genuinely don’t need one. It changes the vibe of households, who wrangle over whether to buy one. But as I listened to a friend talk about being visited, how there was a printed note that looked like it was handwritten and how, next time, he’d say he was cat-sitting, I saw a glint in his eye. My own glinted back. Was it joy?
Licensing is lucrative: it generated £3.8 billion in 2021. I’m not against the fee, but the letters and threats don’t sit quite right with me. Plus, they are expensive. It costs £122 million annually to collect the fee, with £17.5 million on ‘reminder letters and information campaigns’ and £15.8 million on postage.
One-point-two million enforcement visits are made yearly, mostly by Capita’s Visiting Field Officers (called ‘goons’ in hardline anti-TV Licensing circles). The base salary is £23,680, plus commission on licences sold. ‘They are mere door-to-door salespeople,’ one angry man told me in a Facebook group. ‘Grubby little commission earners.’
Enforcement is not historically a popular job. Nor is it especially effective. A 2017 report showed that high staff turnover, with more Field Officers leaving than joining, meant that enforcement was suffering. ‘DO NOT DO THIS JOB,’ wrote one ex-Field Officer on Glassdoor. ‘You are treated like the scum of the earth… When I visit so-called unlicensed premises I hand them a note telling them to close the door on me. The commission I get is not worth it!’
The visits generate huge speculation, and some of the wildest advice. ‘Can you cry on demand?’ a Redditor suggested. ‘IF you do talk to them, talk through your letterbox.’ Other recommendations include tantrums, bricking up the door – or, better still, removing it – and most commonly: ‘NEVER let them into your house.’
One person, Cayle, told an incredulous enforcement officer that he watched DVDs, not live TV. ‘He almost didn’t believe me because it was 2022,’ said Cayle, who obligingly brought the officer into his living room, lined wall to wall with hundreds of DVDs. ‘When he saw those, he said: “Fair enough. We’ll take you off the register and we won’t bother you again.”’
Some send the letters back. There is a whole series of memes of letters being returned or binned to the soundtrack (predictably) of Elvis’s Return to Sender.
‘I didn’t have a telly and had great delight in sending the form back several times a year explaining this in progressively mad text,’ explained one Redditor with relish. ‘Eventually [I] started writing all over it in marker pen – stuff like MY HOME IS MY TEMPLE and DO NOT POLLUTE MY HOME WITH ALPHA WAVES… I can recommend this for soothing the soul.’
Mary Greenburg, who requested to be described as a ‘famous puppeteer’, rang TV Licensing with an invitation to a puppet show. What was their favourite animal? Did they have an emergency contact?
‘The parking around where I live is permits-only,’ she told the Capita employee. ‘I’d need to collect them from the station. I wouldn’t mind picking them up.’
‘Let me get the no-licence feature sorted out for you,’ said the baffled staff member.
Greenburg hasn’t received a letter since. ‘I genuinely wanted them to come round,’ she says. ‘I was just trying to get a date and time so that I could be prepared. I was going to get the Jammy Dodgers in.’
One man, Phil (not his real name) invoiced TV Licensing for £40 in 2014 for ‘receipt and processing of letters’ after they refused to stop contacting him. He was told that ‘TV Licensing won’t accept an invoice for time and costs’, but he successfully sued them for a final sum of £149.03 – in an exchange that took two years and a trip to County Court.
‘The whole process was slow… TVL dragged it out as long as possible,’ Phil commented on Peter Jones’s TV Licensing blog, which had provided advice. ‘I would do it all again.’
Jones said he was ‘delighted’ to hear the result. ‘It was even more satisfying knowing that he had sent red-headed letters and threatened them with bailiffs to bring about their compliance. It’s something I would encourage everyone to do.’
Jones, a research scientist, started his blog (tv-licensing.blogspot.com) as a student in 2008, after receiving ‘objectionable’ letters from TV Licensing. He has written more than 1,000 posts, annotated 442 Freedom of Information requests on WhatDoTheyKnow.com and provided pages of resources, as well as an e-book, in the hopes of ‘educating and informing law-abiding, legitimately licence-free people about TV Licensing’s rights.’
There is, obviously, a darker side to TV Licensing, which is why the blog exists. In 2021, 75 per cent of people prosecuted were women. Campaigners like Jones argue that the system disproportionately targets vulnerable people, who are also more likely to serve prison time (you can’t go to prison for not having a licence, only for failing to pay the fine).
Jones has a licence himself, and stresses that he ‘in no way condones or encourages evasion of the TV Licence fee’. Instead, his concern is the number of households – more than two million in the UK, he says – who do not legally require a licence but are still subjected to ‘a relentless churn of threatening letters’ as well as visits by officers, who, he points out, have ‘no legal right or authority to visit, but like to pretend they do’.
One of the most lauded anti-TV Licensing campaigners has anonymously published almost 20 years of letters on their blog, complete with descriptions of the type of envelope and a rolling estimate of postage costs (£93). They have received 191 letters since 2006. Like Jones, they aim to combat the fear instilled by the letters and empower readers to ‘stand up to the bullies’.
The author has queried the BBC’s prosecution figures, analysed letter signatures – ‘Val Smith of Customer Services changes her signature yearly’ – and interrogated the use of detection vans (10 in total, with some ‘dummy vans’). They spent almost six months trying to decipher why TV Licensing’s letters have ‘Please do not write below this line’ printed at the bottom, despite not needing to be returned (this mystery remains unsolved).
When the BBC discovered the blog, now renamed bbctvlicence.com, they bought up a host of similar domain names within the next two weeks. Likewise, at its peak, Jones’s visitor logs showed that the BBC and Capita were monitoring his blog daily. Once, after he published a joking blog post about a BBC blunder (they had revealed sensitive search warrant figures on an FOI), they got in touch.
After 15 years, Jones still receives messages from readers who are frightened by the letters. Yet the wider perception of TV Licensing is changing, he argues. ‘The general public are becoming more aware of the sinister and deceitful tactics employed by the BBC in the name of TV licence fee enforcement. Skeletons have emerged from the BBC closet and the reputation of the national broadcaster has been irreparably tarnished. For that reason, more people than ever are questioning the future funding of the BBC and continued existence of the TV licence fee.’
What can we learn from this? That there is no investigation. That anti-TV Licensing Facebook groups are intense, but that there are long-fought campaigns that are worthy of attention. That Capita’s press office is not forthcoming. That the licence fee generates vital revenue for the BBC, but that a system that intimidates non-TV users into buying one is unfair. And, crucially, that even a worm will turn.
