BBC CHIEF SAVAGES TV LICENCE BULLIES
After Mail reveals inspectors’ ruthless tactics
VULNERABLE families risk being picked on by TV licence inspectors, the head of the BBC warned last night.
Tony Hall is demanding ‘urgent reassurance’ after the ruthless tactics of the officials were exposed by the Daily Mail. He said Capita – the outsourcing firm paid £59million a year to collect licence fees – had ‘fallen short of the standards the BBC has a right to expect on behalf of the British public’. The director-general made his remarks in a stinging letter to Capita’s £2.7million-a-year boss Andy Parker. Our undercover investigation revealed yesterday that the firm’s agents are each told to catch at least 28 evaders a week – with the lure of £15,000 a year in bonuses.
Staff are told to gather evidence of evasion to drum up court cases.
Vulnerable people targeted in the
‘End these bully boy tactics’
past week include a war veteran with dementia. An undercover reporter who was interviewed for a job collecting licence fees was told: ‘We will drive you as hard as we can to get as much as we can out of you because we’re greedy.’
The BBC has ordered an urgent investigation into the findings and in further developments yesterday:
Dozens of victims contacted the Mail to tell of their ordeals at the hands of licence fee agents;
They included a student nurse, a parish councillor and a pensioner living in sheltered accommodation;
Theresa May told ministers to quiz the BBC about the Mail’s probe;
MPs and campaigners accused TV Licensing of being ‘out of control’ and behaving like a ‘doorstep loan shark’.
In his letter to Mr Parker, Lord Hall asked for urgent confirmation from Capita that ‘vulnerable people are not targeted by Enquiry Officers’.
The Mail Investigations Unit yesterday revealed that Capita is overseeing an aggressive incentive scheme for licence fee agents.
Our reporter was told by TV Licensing boss Ian Doyle that officers must hit a target called the ‘magic 28’ – the number of evaders they must snare a week. The officials can claim another £20-£25 for each ‘success’ over 28.
The reporter was encouraged to spy on homes to work out when people come back from work, before trying to take money on the doorstep.
While all households must have a licence if residents watch or record live TV programmes on any channel or BBC iPlayer, the Mail found vulnerable people have been taken to court unfairly. These included a woman at a refuge fleeing domestic abuse.
Following the Mail’s investigation, Culture Secretary Karen Bradley arranged an urgent meeting with Lord Hall. The Prime Minister’s spokesman said: ‘The licence fee needs to be collected in a fair and reasonable manner. The BBC has quite rightly ordered an urgent investigation into these concerning reports, and ministers will be raising this with the BBC directly.’
Charles Walker, Tory MP for Broxbourne, said some of his vulnerable constituents had been targeted and left feeling ‘ rattled, upset and bullied’. He added: ‘If you give Capita any room at all they will get most things wrong. The time has come for the secretary of state to intervene and put an end to these bully boy tactics.’
Andrew Bridgen, Tory MP for North West Leicestershire, said he was contacted by a constituent who was wrongly prosecuted by TV Licensing while he was chronically ill.
He added: ‘The BBC employs complete double standards by producing programmes like Watchdog and then enforcing their licence fee collection with methods more suited to a doorstep loan shark.’
Capita says that it does not target vulnerable people. It says its incentive scheme applies only to sales of licence fees – not the numbers interviewed with a view to court action.
A spokesman added: ‘ The comments of the individuals in this interview do not reflect the standards we expect and paint a wholly misleading picture of the culture, skills and attitude of TV Licensing’s operation.
‘We are investigating what took place in the interview and have taken appropriate action.’
A BBC spokesman said last night: ‘It’s our policy to only prosecute evaders as a last resort.’
THE bullying tactics used by outsourcing giant Capita to collect TV licence fees on behalf of the BBC will send shivers down the spine of every homeowner with a television.
If any of us forget to pay for a licence or fall on hard times and can’t afford one, will we be next in the sights of its army of collectors, who will seek to drag us to court and land us with a criminal record if we don’t pay up?
Rather than projecting the caring, sharing image of ‘Auntie’, the nation’s public broadcaster, we learn that the spendthrift BBC chiefs have handed over the responsibility for collecting a poll tax on the British people to unscrupulous persecutors.
Surely the national broadcaster should have known Capita has been caught using unscrupulous tactics in the past.
As the Mail revealed on Monday, Capita places extraordinary pressure on its collectors to chase alleged licence fee evaders, showing no mercy regardless of personal difficulties.
The distressing stories of some of these victims, including people with dementia and mothers in refuges, should have the bosses of the BBC and their partners Capita hanging their heads in shame.
Can this be the same BBC that latches onto every example it can find of cuts in public services and seeks to portray them as a stain on the Government’s reputation?
By using a firm that employs the hardball tactics disclosed by this newspaper’s investigative reporting, director-general Tony Hall and the BBC trustees, charged with protecting the public interest, are betraying the social contract between citizen and TV licence payer.
Yesterday, Lord Hall wrote to Andy Parker, chief executive of Capita, to express what he described as his ‘ serious concern’ at the Mail’s exposé.
The embarrassing disclosures come at a time when the £3.74 billion of income received by the BBC from the licence fee is increasingly seen as an anachronism.
We live in an age when much of the news, entertainment and sport we see is downloaded by broadband to mobile devices and TV monitors, bypassing terrestrial TV channels.
Underhand
Given the sea change in viewing habits, the public broadcaster is playing with fire in having any association with the kind of tactics deployed by Capita. It raises big questions as to what is the real justification for the licence fee.
No doubt Lord Hall had that in mind when he wrote yesterday that ‘public trust is the cornerstone of the licence fee system’.
What fair-minded citizens will dislike about the disclosures is the idea that collectors employed by Capita used underhand methods to discover possible evaders.
They milked neighbours for information, used informal chats to lull people into a false sense of security and then pounced on alleged offenders with fines of up to £1,000 and possible criminal convictions.
Perhaps we should not be too surprised that Capita, a publicly quoted company that recently fell out of the FTSE 100 blue chip index, pressured its 330 field officers into pursuing arbitrary targets to catch as many victims as possible.
The requirement to find the ‘magic 28’ evaders each week — revealed by the boss secretly filmed by the Mail — is an incentive for the collectors to ignore the social circumstances of those it regards as offenders to achieve incentive payments.
For this is by no means the first time Capita has been accused of immoral practices.
Last year, the Channel 4 documentary programme Dispatches showed video footage of the chief medical officer at Capita telling assessors of disability benefits ‘to do as many assessments a day as you can possibly manage’.
Capita was working on behalf of the Department of Work and Pensions.
As much as the taxpayer may want to see the nation’s welfare payments reduced, no one would approve of assessors being trained and incentivised to remove sometimes hardpressed cases from the welfare rolls without proper care and due process.
Shackles
As is the case with the TV licence collectors, such practices are totally at odds with the humane way that citizens expect to be treated by officialdom.
One might have hoped that given its history, Capita would retain a proper understanding of the ethos of public service.
The company was formed at the height of the Thatcher era, in 1984, as a division of the non-profit-making Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy.
It broke free from its nonprofit shackles in 1987 and later floated on the stock market. The company has rarely been free from scandal. Its founding chairman, Rod Aldridge, left in 2006 amid allegations that a personal loan of £1 million from him to the Labour Party may have assisted the group in winning government contracts.
Today, the group is a multibillion-pound company that affects every aspect of our daily lives, managing the organisation of benefits for the Government, council property and health services, plus IT systems and asset management services for investors.
Together with other outsourcing firms — including controversial 2012 Olympic Security provider G4S, prison operator Serco, hospital and building services provider Mitie and others — Capita forms part of a sector that has grown rich and prosperous thanks to the privatisation of government contracts.
As these deals come under greater scrutiny from the media, the House of Commons and independent auditors, it has become evident that as these firms have grown richer and more powerful, any notion of ethical capitalism has been abandoned and replaced with rapacious behaviour.
In addition to the ruthless approach to those without a BBC TV licence, Capita’s recent record is strewn with scandal.
The offences range from the company’s staff allegedly receiving payments to deliberately loosen electronic ankle tags on prisoners to charges that pension payments to locum GPs were not being recorded correctly. Yet despite these problems, and a share price that has bombed from a 2015 peak of 1,200p to 550p (in latest trading) the company’s directors remain hugely well paid.
Chief executive Andy Parker earned £2.7 million last year, including a £550,000 bonus; the head of group operations, Vic Gysin, earned more than his boss with £ 2.8 million, and senior executive Maggie Bell, in charge of bringing in new business, earned £2.2 million.
The company’s new chairman, Ian Powell, is a just retired former senior partner of auditors PwC, the accounting firm humiliated at the Oscars after bungling the Best Film award envelope.
PwC is also under investigation for its auditing of the accounts of disgraced BHS owner Sir Philip Green.
Freefall
Powell has been brought in by independent directors and shareholders with the onerous task of restoring Capita’s tarnished reputation, shaking up the top management and helping to pull the group’s share price out of freefall.
The enormity of the job ahead will have been exacerbated by the disclosure of the appalling culture exposed in Capita’s work for the BBC.
The Beeb’s appetite for ever more public funds to pay for its imperial news-gathering and entertainment ambitions knows no apparent bounds.
In this quest, it has retained Capita which, we now know, used shameful behaviour to collect licence fees.
The BBC has long relied on public subsidy and in turn the public good faith that keeps the licence fee in place.
But if this Capita fiasco is allowed to be repeated, then Auntie will find support for its massive income leeching away all too quickly.