A LICENCE TO BULLY
One in ten of all magistrate hearings ++ A third of criminal cases brought against women ++ Children as young as ten ‘prosecuted’ ++ The damning truth about the BBC’s relentless pursuit of its licence-fee billions from some of the most vulnerable in socie
Kathleen Quinton, a nurse, was watching Chinese food programme Flavorful Origins — her favourite show on streaming channel netflix — with her husband Francis when the tV licensing ‘enforcement officer’ knocked on their front door in april this year.
The official-looking stranger asked if the couple had a tV licence, to which Kathleen initially said: ‘Yes.’
then she broke down in tears. the truth is that the direct debit payment had bounced due to a lack of funds in the Quinton account.
She hadn’t told Francis or their 16-year-old daughter and 12-year- old son, because she wanted to spare them the sleepless nights she had suffered over the outstanding bill.
earlier this week, at Guildford Magistrates’ Court in Surrey, Kathleen was fined £205 for not having a tV licence.
(although she often watches netflix, which does not require a tV licence, she sometimes watches BBC programmes, for which she does require one.) Kathleen did not attend court because she could not afford to take a day off her work at a doctor’s surgery or pay the fare for the 51-mile journey from her home in tunbridge Wells, Kent.
now, the Quinton family are facing a nightmare Christmas, wondering how to raise the cash to cover the penalty. For if Kathleen, 39, doesn’t pay, she could be hauled back in front of magistrates for non-payment of a fine that, if unpaid, risks a prison sentence.
She’s not alone. Shockingly, plenty of people have found themselves behind bars for not having a tV licence, which now costs £154.50 a year. (a licence is required by anyone watching any live broadcasts or BBC catch- up services, such as iPlayer.)
last year, five people were imprisoned for not paying their tV licence fines, and in 2017, 19 were jailed, representing 0.1 per cent of offenders, who spent less than four days in prison.
the issue was back in the news this week, with campaigners cheering Boris Johnson’s call to decriminalise non-payment of the licence fee, arguing that it disproportionately affects women and the poorest in society.
With many of the over-75s now having to pay the licence fee from June 2020, it seems many vulnerable elderly people will suddenly be forced to pay. If they forget to do so, or are unaware of the rule change, they risk prosecution, fines and even prison if they don’t pay the fine.
the BBC agreed to fund licences for the over75s in 2015 — in exchange for the Government forcing people who watched the Corporation’s catch-up programmes on iPlayer to cough up for a licence. (Previously, only those watching live tV were required to have a licence.)
Yet, later, in what some said was an attempt to wriggle out of the deal, the BBC commissioned a consultancy firm to review other options. Sure enough, this firm found that ‘there is a case for reform of the current over-75s concession’.
It later emerged some over-75s (for example, those in receipt of pension credit and other benefits) would not have to pay after all, but thousands will face the extra bill.
the BBC raises close to £4 billion from the licence fee, much of which is used to pay the enormous salaries of its stars and army of managers.
Of course, the Corporation is loved by millions, and many of the critically acclaimed programmes it produces, including Sir David attenborough’s Seven Worlds, One Planet and his Dark Materials, make millions when they are syndicated worldwide.
But the BBC’s growing aggression in raising this money has been matched by mounting public outrage at the tactics it uses to do so.
the Magistrates’ association has been calling for the decriminalisation of licence non-payment for 20 years. the cases account for approximately one in ten of its hearings in england and Wales.
It has been suggested that the new tory government might seek to downgrade the ‘crime’ of nonpayment to the status of a civil debt, such as an unpaid electricity bill, to be dealt with by civil courts.
the most recent figures show that 184,595 people were charged with non-payment of the licence fee in 2016. around 140,000 were fined and 90 were jailed. Incredibly, according to campaigners, hundreds of these prosecutions were against children, some as young as ten.
those who fall foul of this aggressive body can find themselves trapped in a Byzantine and occasionally capricious system with little concern for the reality of people’s lives — or sympathy for those who have made a genuine mistake.
THE Mail has been investigating the draconian behaviour of the tV licensing authority, the body contracted by the BBC to enforce its licensing system.
What we discovered was alarming to say the least. this organisation dispatches ‘enforcement officers’ from outsourcing company Capita — which receives nearly £60 million a year of taxpayers’ money — to the doorsteps of people such as Kathleen and, in many cases, can cause distress.
What’s more, the enforcement officers are paid bonuses for every defaulter they get to pay on the spot for a tV licence, and often carry with them machines to collect the money from credit or debit cards.
the Mail attended tV licensing court cases across the country this week and found some people were facing hefty fines for non-payment, even though they insisted they didn’t watch tV, or that the ‘enforcement officials’ had made a mistake.
One such person was emily Reid, 19, who had to travel more than 200 miles from her home in Kirkby, liverpool, to Stratford Magistrates’ Court in east london. earlier this year, she had visited her father, a taxi driver, from Ruislip, West london, while he was in hospital.
an enforcement officer called at the house and asked emily why there was no current tV licence registered at the address. emily, flustered by the officer’s demands, failed to explain that she did not live at the address and, therefore, the licence was not her responsibility.
her father was behind with the tV licence paperwork, as he had been hospitalised with a kidney disease, but he has since paid in full.
emily, who hopes to join the police, recalled this week that the ‘intimidating’ officer even entered her father’s house to check there was a television. the prosecution went ahead, with the case being heard in Merseyside, where she is a student, before being moved to london.
Yet, when she turned up at the london court on tuesday, after paying £50 for a train ticket to get there, the case was suddenly withdrawn.
to any reasonable person, this aggressive legal pursuit of a blameless teenager is disgraceful.
emily said afterwards: ‘I cried when I first went to court. If something had gone against me, it could have stopped my ambition to go into policing. to have had a criminal record, even though I had done nothing wrong, would have ruined my future career. I came all the way here for them to drop it.’
Joanna Ferreira, 27, was also hauled far from home to the same east london court this week. the administrative worker said the enforcement officer at her door asked her seven-year-old daughter about the family’s tV habits.
Joanna was then made to set up a monthly direct debit on the spot and advised she wouldn’t be prosecuted for not having the licence, which she had not realised had expired.
Yet she received a summons nonetheless. She told magistrates at her hearing that she had paid up. ‘It was not made clear that the matter might progress further,’ she explained. But she was still fined £ 40 and
ordered to pay costs of £ 92. Outside the court, Joanna told the Mail: ‘I am a working person who pays tax, and then they criminalise me for something we can so easily forget about.’
After listening to these stories, it would be easy to agree with Caroline Levesque-Bartlett, 41, a French teacher and former legal editor who runs the campaign group End The BBC Licence Fee.
SHE says: ‘The Corporation (under its TV licensing umbrella) is using deceit and fear to prey on the vulnerable in order to compensate for an increasing lack of interest in what they offer. More and more people are switching off.’
‘I have not had a licence for three years and watch only [non-BBC] catch-up TV. This is perfectly legal. People like me are not licence- evaders: we simply don’t want or need a licence .’
On her campaign website, Caroline tells followers: ‘ Every month, TV Licensing sends nasty letters to people, insinuating they are breaking the law and that an investigation (and a £1,000 fine plus legal costs) is afoot.
‘I have received more than 20, with headlines ranging from: ‘You risk a court appearance and a criminal prosecution’ to: ‘As we haven’t heard from you, an officer will visit your property soon’.
All this must be frightening for the over-75s, who often rely on a TV for company and now face paying for a benefit they may have taken for granted for years — with the prospect of prison if they fail to comply with any fines.
An even more extraordinary element of this BBC cash-grab — enforced by people whom many believe are bullying snoopers — is that even young children and teenagers are being targeted.
According to Caroline, four children aged ten and 11 were prosecuted for not having TV licences from 2009 to 2014. Twenty aged 12 to 14-years-old, and more than 400 teenagers in the 15-to-17 bracket were lined up for prosecution in the seven years to 2016.
Caroline says: ‘If the enforcement officer knocks on the door and a child [ of ten or more] answers, the officer can still ask them to sign a document that opens them to prosecution.’
However, a spokesman for the BBC insisted that children as young as ten are not prosecuted for not paying the licence fee, and added: ‘Our policy is to prosecute people aged 18 or over.
‘We have reviewed this issue before and found around ten cases where someone aged 17 — but no younger — had been prosecuted, and tightened our systems further. Prosecution is a last resort and most people do pay their licence. We have a range of support for those who find it difficult to pay.
‘It’s never been our policy to prosecute children and we had a tightening-up, making it impossible for visiting enforcement officers to input an age under 18.
Students, too, are in the BBC’s sights. The TV Licensing Authority recently said: ‘In the last year, more than 20,000 people aged 18 to 25 have been interviewed by our officers for watching live TV or BBC iPlayer without a valid licence.
‘As the new academic year starts, we remind students that they risk facing prosecution and a fine of up to £1,000 if they are caught watching live TV or BBC programmes on iPlayer without a licence. This includes any device, not just a TV set.’ Clearly, there is a whiff of Big Brother about all of this.
And certainly the prosecutions hit women particularly hard: last year, 72 per cent of all cases heard for TV licence non-payment were against women, with one in three of all criminal cases of any kind against women.
Campaigners say women are particularly vulnerable because they are more likely than men both to struggle to pay the fee and to be at home when the zealous officials arrive at their doors.
Jenna, a former health counsellor from Bromley, South East London, has learnt this the hard way. She, too, was called to Guildford Magistrates’ Court this week, but failed to appear owing to mobility problems. However, she was ordered to pay court costs of £120 when she pleaded guilty.
The 39-year- old, who is single, explained to the Mail: ‘I have been paying and was not trying to evade it. I don’t want a criminal record.
‘I only have £70 of the current licence fee outstanding. But when I started making payments that I could afford, they [TV Licensing] doubled the amount.
‘I tried to get in touch by email and phone to explain things, but they never came back to me before I was taken to court. What is happening is an injustice. I am not working, so don’t pay tax. But this TV licence is a tax.’
And it seems certain that nurse Kathleen Quinton would agree. She was so upset at the outcome of her hearing this week that she asked husband Francis to explain to the Mail exactly how the family had run into debt — a situation that has worsened because of the TV Licensing Authority’s tactics.
Former lorry driver Francis was injured in a freak accident, which meant he could no longer work, so Kathleen now bears the brunt of supporting the family.
They were still struggling to get back on their feet when the TV enforcer turned up. Francis told the Mail: ‘I hadn’t a clue who [the official] worked for. He was rude and asked short, sharp questions. He tried to make out we had money because we live in a new home, although it’s social housing.
‘ We explained what we had been through, but he showed no sympathy. When Kathleen began to cry, I did too.’
He adds: ‘[Kathleen] didn’t tell me about the TV licence payment bouncing. She bore it all on her shoulders until this man came round, and she said what had happened. Now, with her fine facing us, we are at our wits’ end.’
That doesn’t seem right at Christmas.