A "TV License" is one of those things I alway assumed people were making up to satirize the claims of over-regulation & bureaucracy in the UK.
Finding out it was real was a mixture of hilarious and sobering.
replies(19):
Finding out it was real was a mixture of hilarious and sobering.
It’s a form of tax that pays for public service broadcasting, including radio stations.
> A Licensing officer may call at your property not to collect the letters but to check that you are not watching a TV.
and
>...Cas Scott has said that the letters are not sought by TVL/BBC agents who make street visits.
Like, they show up at your home and ask to physically view your TV to make sure you aren't watching TV! It's so incredibly bonkers to me, I'm laughing out loud at work at the mental image!
Never change, UK, never change.
As of 2024 you pay even if you have no tv, which means the overhead is probably near zero, as you already have lists of where people live.
The tv license collection agency employs more than a 1000 people.
And this is in spite of the fact that nearly every household has to pay that €18.36 per month.
In my seven years of living in the UK, I’ve paid the TV licence for two years, and had one visit (who I shut the door on).
I think there also were some large cases where a company who owned a car fleet had to pay for the car radios.
Publicly funded media is a great thing to have, and the intention of TV License is to fund it independently from interference from the government of the day. In Australia there’s frequently stories about governments cutting ABC funding, which TV License is supposed to avoid entirely.
But the implementation in practice just sucks. It’s baffling to think of how much money is wasted on administering this additional tax program, sending out all these pretty aggressive letters, maintaining the website, and paying the real “inspectors” to knock on peoples doors.
the absurd part is restricting that tax to only people who watch TV, and trying to do surveillance and enforcement to determine whether or not somebody is eligible for a TV tax.
[1] Big parts of our public television suck. But ARTE is awesome!
* Borgen
* Occupied
* Mit offenen Karten
* Karambolage
* …
Just the thought of this is funny. What kind of uniforms do TV Officers wear? Do they get to carry a weapon? What happens if they find you watching a TV?
Amazing.
I found out that in my country you can have a third-party, approved technician come to your house to disable the tuner portion of your TV so that you would not have to pay any television license. Around this time analog broadcasting was already being phased out or had already completely shut down in my country. And although some kind of digital broadcasting over air-waves exists to replace it, most people do not use that. Instead, you'll typically buy a subscribtion via cable or via IPTV or via sattelite, all of which come with a separate box that plugs into your TV via HDMI instead of relying on the tuner in your TV, even if that tuner can decode digitally broadcast radio signals. So the tuner in the TV was not serving much of a purpose anyway, even if I'd ever want to use the TV as a TV.
I paid a technician a bit of money to come disable the tuner for me in my newly bought 55" LED TV. I was imagining that he'd be opening the TV and carefully removing some essential part. What he actually did was take a plier and break the input for the tuner and then put a small piece of tape over it. Simple solutions, I guess. Then, I think I also got them to write a letter for me confirming that the tuner had been disabled.
It cost me a little bit of money, but not too much. Less than paying the TV license fee for that and subsequent years I was staying in that house anyway.
These days, I still have the TV. I put it in my grandfather's house a few years ago so he could use it. He already pays TV license fee and has a digital receiver. It has HDMI out which goes in to the TV. So he is not inconvenienced by the broken tuner input of the TV either, just like I expected back then that this disabling of the tuner would never be a problem even if I ever wanted to use it as a TV.
It does seem kind of silly now, that I paid someone to come break the input for a portion of the TV that was never going to be needed even if you wanted to use it as a TV. But I still think it was worth it, and that it saved me from worrying about inspections. Even though no inspection ever happened at the house either back in the days where I was using it as a monitor for my computer.
We have this ridiculous situation where I'm not required to pay (so I don't), yet the TV licensing people are allowed (required?) to send me junk mail week after week trying to trick me into thinking I do need to pay them.
It's just not enforced. Also the party platform wasn't to get rid of the license system but to encrypt the broadcast signal so that only willing NHK viewers would pay for the license.
> colour TV: £169.50 per year; monochrome TV: £57.00 per year; blind people: 50% discount
People who can't see their color TV at all pay more than people who can but have an old black-and-white one?
If they catch you watching TV they will report you for a £1000 fine and a criminal record. Failing to pay it will land you in prison.
I spent years without a license, you don't need one for YouTube and Netflix. I unplugged the aerial wire. You do need it for any live TV or BBC catch up TV. I got visited once during that time and he kept asking to come in, I kept telling him I didn't need to let him. He kept asking what I watch on TV, I told him politely, that was none of his concern.
If they suspect you are harboring an illegal TV then they will come back with a warrant and the police!
"Any services from the BBC" means any. TV broadcast, radio broadcast, or internet streaming. And because the actual intention was to make everyone pay, the law is written so you have to pay if you could receive one. If you have a computer and the Internet, you could receive internet streaming.
And then you have more stupid rules, like even though they're collecting a tax, they're not tax collectors so they don't have any authority to come into your house, so they invent weird ways to detect if you have a TV or not.
Presumably a left wing government would remove all this stuff and just make it a tax.
There is plenty to criticise but the weird ring fenced tax that we pay is incredible value for money (films, tv, web, journalism for the price of Netflix
I've given this a lot of thought in the past. The best I could come up with is that "legally blind" could still allow for someone with _very poor_ (colour) vision...
> the law is written so you have to pay if you could receive one.
That's not true. You're allowed to own equipment capable of receiving licensed broadcasts, all that matters is that you don't.
Of course, that still doesn't make sense because to the best of my knowledge you don't need a license of any kind to listen to the radio.
Anyway, perhaps blind people want to listen to the TV. There are a lot of programs that could make sense even if you can hear but not see them.
That's not true, according to https://www.gov.uk/find-licences/tv-licence.
> You do not need a TV Licence to watch:
> • streaming services like Netflix and Disney Plus
> • on-demand TV through services like All 4 and Amazon Prime Video
> • videos on websites like YouTube
> • videos or DVDs
Now I'm forced to pay for old sitcoms, astrology shows, soccer stuff and other useless things I don't watch anyways...
I believe you did once upon a time, but I guess they were phased out as TVs became more popular.
>The first supplementary licence fee for colour television was introduced in January 1968. Radio-only licences were abolished in February 1971 (along with the requirement for a separate licence for car radios).
https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200405/cmselect/cmcu...
Oh to be a a fly on the wall when the inspector has to explain the difference to a blind person.
I think it made a lot more sense in the past. The license is set up so it’s a consumption based tax rather than taxing everyone. So only people with TVs paid TV tax. If colour increased the costs, only people consuming colour paid those increases. I imagine it made much more sense before consumption was ubiquitous
I hate having to pay for distribution licenses for soccer games, but if that ensures continued support for high-quality journalism, so be it.
If you were to design such a system in the 2020's, you could just put a DRM scheme on your broadcast and demand payment only from the people who actually want to watch that network specifically, but that technology wasn't yet available when such systems were designed.
Another claimed benefit of this way of doing things is the government's ability to produce programs that aren't commercially viable, e.g. targetting specific populations, minorities who speak a niche language, distributing important public information in a non-sensational way etc.
Most of these points are moot with the advent of the internet, though, hence why many countries want to or have abolished these licensing systems.
I'm no fan of national broadcasters as a concept, but I have to say, the UK is excellent when it comes to audio description, much more so than any (English speaking) country I'm aware of. It's not just the BBC either, Sky and other private broadcasters also have relatively high standards.
For years, the only English AD you could get for extremely popular HBO shows, like Game of Thrones for example, were pirated British rips from Sky, as HBO famously refused to provide the service.
There is no money being wasted. Although it might certainly be a case of paper being wasted.
We've been sent letters on an almost monthly basis claiming that an officer is "scheduled" to make a visit, that we have a "ten day window" to respond before they take action, etc... . Nothing ever happens and no one ever visits.
I know that you don't have to let the enforcement folk in, and if they turn up I'll politely ask to see their search warrant or for them to mind their own business. But lots of people don't know this and are conditioned to be passive. Prosecutions include the mentally vulnerable and people whose finances are handled by the council. There are thousands every year. Three quarters of the prosecutions are against women, and it makes up more than a quarter of prosecutions against women.
If you're blind, you almost certainly qualify for a free license.
Eh, the 2 countries I know charge people if they have a device capable of viewing the TV/radio/the TV/radio stations' online offer, so anyone with a smartphone (and who doesn't have a smartphone?) are also require to pay the license fee, even if they don't have a TV or radio at home.
There's a joke that since the license fee is charged if you have equipment theoretically capable of viewing TV, then maybe people should apply for government child allowance, since they have equipment theoretically able to make them parents.
But it's unheard of (for media[1]) in the US and common in Europe.
[1]The closest thing we have here might be parking passes for state parks, even unpopular ones where free parking would remain mostly empty.
https://www.gov.uk/free-discount-tv-licence
https://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/check-if-you-need-one/for-your...
The van soon left after a few days but left a full bottle of yellow liquid. Makes a fun story, but yeah they threaten you a bunch and it's quite sad.
This is unlikely - partly any news media is biased against government as they do the actual decisions, but mostly the BBC is middle class britain incarnate, whereas the tories represent - well whatever the right wing is becoming these days.
As for licence fee - it’s basically a historical accident that became a ring fenced tax. Governments have strong views about people not paying taxes.
[0] https://www.capita.com/news/capita-announces-five-year-exten...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licensing_in_the_Un...
[1] https://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/check-if-you-need-one/topics/t...
So yes, of course there is absolutely money being wasted in this comparison.
That's kinda assuming that everybody would continue to pay the license fee if the enforcement was stopped.
I have no clue how much revenue the TV licenses generate, or whether 100 million for administration and enforcement is a reasonable number. It feels unlikely to me?
Google google google:
In 2021, there were 24.8 million households in England
The TV licence fee is currently £159 a year
It's real in the sense a thing called a TV Licence exists but the TV Licence enforcers are just an arm from the BBC who larp as a government organisation to threaten people.
So in a sense it's real but it's also not.
Of course, to be considered legally blind, your vision has to be that bad with the best correction available. (Below 20/200)
There are people going door-to-door to check TV licenses? Are they cops, what kind of power do they have? Seems extremely annoying and dystopian.
My jurisdiction finally got rid of annual/biannual car registration fees and stickers. Was a rather pointless process other than collecting money.
Was hoping they'd raise gas taxes by 0.1cents/litre or something, but I guess they buried it in with other taxes.
Unfortunately, we still require driver's license renewals every 5 years for CAD$90. And they don't bother taking a picture with every renewal because that was too much bureaucracy for them. I think it's only once I'm 80 they'll haul me in for a cognitive test.
Meanwhile the Canadian CBC is buried in taxes and has as many ads as any other station.
It sounds so farcical now, in our age of ubiquitous surveillance capitalism.
It would be easy to say they don't make anything like Kenneth Clarke programs anymore but even late Blair era documentaries seem to be fading away. Nature stuff is still good though but that's just cinematography.
This will probably kill it.
One single broadcast signal, and different capabilities of receivers.