The TV licence inspectors are employees of whichever private company the contract is with at the time (Capita last time I checked, but that was a while ago). As such, they have no powers beyond those of any other citizen; their doorstep tactics are essentially to ask if they can come in, ask to look around, and try to catch people out in conversation.
The web has numerous examples of people with no TV, who have told the relevant body this, and yet nonetheless receive an endless stream of threatening letters. The letters tend to follow the same pattern; polite reminders to harsh reminders to threats of discovery and huge fines, and then back to polite reminders again. Essentially, their model is to assume that anyone without a TV is lying, and does have a TV. It's probably quite effective and certainly a lot cheaper than trying to keep track of who actually doesn't have a TV.
So, if you've got a TV (that you use to receive broadcast transmissions - you don't need a licence just to own the TV, you need it for some of its possible uses) in the UK and you have no TV licence, you can be pretty sure that you can ignore the letters and, should a private citizen working for Capita come to the door, you need not answer or let them in or even talk to them. The only way they could demand entry would be with a suitable court document and accompanied by an officer of the court (who frankly has better things to do with his time), but to get that document they need reasonable evidence, and simply not having a TV licence is not actually considered evidence of illegally using a TV to receive broadcast transmissions.
Essentially, their model is to assume that anyone without a TV is lying, and does have a TV.
This is not strictly true. I've had no TV license for several years; after the first letter, I filled in the "declaration of no live TV signal" form (or whatever it's called) on their website, and since then, they haven't bothered me once. This is despite having a TV clearly visible through my living-room window (that I use exclusively for games and DVDs). Maybe I'm just lucky.
That said, I feel it slightly ridiculous that you need a TV license (which is for funding the BBC) to watch live TV, even if you never watch any BBC channels -- but you don't need one to listen to BBC radio stations, or use their website, or even stream BBC shows on iPlayer after broadcast. If I didn't suspect it'd pave the way for the government to cannibalise their funding, I'd say it'd make much more sense for the BBC to be funded through general taxation instead of the current horribly over-engineered TV license system.
Fair enough. I think you must just have been lucky. I know people who have told them over and over and over again to no avail (and indeed, you can find many such people on the web).
I got those letters while in University. They are nasty. The people manning the phones aren't much better.
As an English speaking international student, most of the ESL international students brought their letters to me and they were quite scared by them. I had to explain that everything was fine, we just needed to call the company and tell them that they didn't have a TV.
That being said, most of the money from the TV license goes to the BBC, and since I'm 50/50 iPlayer and lovefilm, I don't mind paying that TV license. I'd rather better BBC shows than having to fork out for, say, Sky.
It was certainly possible to detect the operation of TVs once; the old-school CRT boxes had big oscillators in that emitted EM radiation. I don't know about modern TVs; for all I know they have a different method of operation now.
That said, it requires not just the equipment to do so, but also the competence and training, and whilst it's not impossible, licence inspectors are just whoever Capita managed to hire that month; maintaining a cadre of competent people to operate that equipment would be a headache and an expense that Capita simply aren't interested in.
Far, far cheaper to simply have that big list of addresses (I understand they've got a list of every address in the UK that ever had a TV licence associated with it) and just assume that every address on that list that doesn't currently have a TV licence is a licence-dodger. Every so often it presumably gets pruned for addresses that no longer exist, but otherwise the rate of false positive will be a minor annoyance in the scheme and certainly not worth the hassle and expense of more sophisticated methods. Threatening letters and intimidating adverts do the job.
Detector vans are a PR stunt to frighten people. Nobody has ever been prosecuted based on evidence gathered from a detector van. They can be used to get search warrants though.
The vans can detect a CRT TV on the ground floor; that's about it.
The database of TV owners is the easier way to catch people. In the UK if you buy or rent a TV (or other bit of equipment that can be used to watch/record TV programmes[1]) from a shop (not private sale) then the seller has a duty to collect your name and address and report this to the TV Licensing authorities.
Same (I think) for people who sign up to any other form of TV programme distribution: Sky, BT Vision, Virgin Media, etc.
They then look for people who've got Sky or have just bought a TV and that don't have a license. That'll get the vast majority of people.
Then there's the people that either don't have a TV (or anything else similar), or who have one but don't use it to watch broadcast TV.
I had a period where I didn't have a TV and used to get hassled by letter once a month. Some people in a similar situation would refuse to let the inspectors into their house and endured endless letters, phone calls and visits. I just let the bloke in to look around, he saw there was no telly and left. The letters and hassle stopped after that.
The rules about what you do and don't need a TV License for make it even more difficult:-
"
The law states that you need to be covered by a TV Licence if you watch or record television programmes, on any device, as they're being shown on TV. This includes TVs, computers, mobile phones, games consoles, digital boxes and Blu-ray/DVD/VHS recorders.
You don't need a licence if you don't use any of these devices to watch or record television programmes as they're being shown on TV - for example, if you use your TV only to watch DVDs or play video games, or you only watch ‘catch up’ services like BBC iPlayer or 4oD.
"
It really hasn't caught up with the digital age. All they've done is add endless extra layers and clauses to the legislation to make it horribly complex.
1. A gross simplication. The actual definition is even more complex (as with most UK legal stuff) than this.
A friend from Holland was over and they wanted to buy a Freesat receiver which of course they couldn't without a UK address, so they used mine (asked me first of course)
It says there are 13,000 licences for black and white TV's, so I wonder how many of those are just trying to get their licences cheap but actually own a colour TV.
My mother was fined for having a colour television whilst having a black and white license. She had forgotten to upgrade since being given the television from my grand parents.
To stop all the letters. I had no TV for a couple of years and we would get letters all the time. Even when told the inspectors would still try and come round. They even faked who they were once, pretended they were here to deliver a package.
An irrational sense of not cheating quite as much. A vast overestimation of TV Licensing's ability to detect you - something like correlating cable/satellite subscription databases with license payers list (as if paying for cable, but claiming to own a BW TV set isn't a red flag) and the nefarious detector vans.
The physical principle is that they detect the leakage from the local oscillator in the superheterodyne receiver circuit.
I very much doubt that they exist now, if they ever did. It just isn't cost efficient compared to sending out letters and low paid inspectors who peer through windows looking for people watching TV.
The only means I know of for one to reliably detect the image on the screen would be TEMPEST style attacks [1]. I doubt that Capita can afford to buy the necessary equipment, or even views it as economically viable given the volume of letters they sent out - 56 million letters were sent in 2009, for example [2].
I'm not sure if modern TVs will even emit anything obvious since the connection from the decoder to the panel is covered in EMI shielding.
Blind people who still like to listen to television may be a significant cause of this. They receive a 50% discount on both colour and b&w licenses, so from their point of view there's probably little reason to upgrade from a black and white television.
Why? If it’s working why change it? It only costs money and you will buy something that is more complex and breaks more easily. If you don’t particularly care about TV or the image quality, why wouldn’t you?
(During the last thirty years of their marriage my parents had two TVs, both CRTs. Just now they bought a new plasma TV. They never buy the cheap stuff, but they always try to use everything for as long as possible, a philosophy I’m also quite fond of. Nevertheless I’m not holding my breath for this new TV also lasting 15 years. The guy my parents bought it from – a nice gumpy old fellow, excellent electrician but no longer really fitting into this world – was pretty pessimistic about the prospects of this TV lasting any more than four, five years. Oh, and this thing is a computer. You can access the internet and install apps and all that crap. Nothing my parents will ever use, but if you buy a good panel that’s what you get. If you want it or not. At least it works perfectly fine as a dumb monitor for the cable box. Another of these unpleasant things of the modern age. However, I wonder what happens when Panasonic stops updating this TV, should it last that long, which it probably will. Suddenly having an old TV is no longer harmless.)
I wouldn’t bother. Those TVs hardly matter and it’s not a way to reduce power consumption. The problem will solve itself, as those using B&W TVs die out.
Every little bit doesn’t matter. That’s an ass backwards way of going about reducing power consumption, like firing the gardner in the White House to reduce the deficit.
If you're perfectly happy with your old trusty 65" 6k 3D TV with MegaHypervison 2, why would you want your grandkids to force you to upgrade to a new 110" 12k TV with SUPER3D-doublePlus and MegaHypervison 4? You'll probably mainly just be using it to watch your silly old movies and TV shows that are only in a pathetic 4k resolution and don't even use MegaHypervison 2 let alone MegaHypervision 4.
"If I have children/grandchildren I hope they prevent me from doing something like that."
Why? If you are an elderly person who has a TV set that they like why change it for a newfangled colour one with a bunch of features that they are not going to use? They just get their grandkids to install a Freeview box and connect it to the TV and they are happy once more.
According to the TV licensing people there are roughly 25 million TV licenses in the UK. So 0.05% of TV licenses are black and white. That's a tiny number and not really surprising if you consider, say, an older person who has a perfectly good working black and white TV set that they see no reason to 'upgrade' to colour.
Other stats show that around 2% of households in the UK do not have a TV (or at least a license).
If the UK as anything like Sweden and if my circle of friends and acquaintances are in any way representative, I'd estimate at least 70% of people without a license have a TV.
The rule about using the TV to watch broadcasts was a court ruling from about 20 years ago IIRC - the original language of the law was that just owning a TV was enough.
I'm not a legal scholar, but I think it was with reference to the fact that when the law was written, the only purpose a TV could reasonably have was to watch the broadcasts of the BBC, and so there was no point in clarifying this in the language of the law. With the advent of VCR's, it became perfectly reasonable to own a TV for other purposes than watching broadcast TV, and the court ruled that the intent of the law was to license watching TV, not owning a TV.
In Sweden you have to pay if you own a TV capable of watching live to air telly, irregardless of if you actually do or not. So unless you physically remove the relevant electronics, you need a license, even if you're only using it as a large computer monitor.
In Denmark, the license is on TVs, any internet-enabled device or smartphone - basically, anyone is covered. It's ridiculous that they haven't had the decency to just make it a plain household-tax instead of this fake-pretend.
In the UK they've made it more complex that a license is required (for your home address) if you watch live TV on any device (including a computer or smartphone).
A partially-sighted TV license for a B&W TV is £25, compared to £75 for a full colour one. Ebay has quite a few B&W TVs available for £5-10.
There are 360,000 people registered as partially-sighted in the UK, although around a third of those are over 75 (and so get a free license anyway). I imagine this must count for a fair proportion of those 13,000 TVs.
I was always under the impression that the licence was for the tuner, rather than the actual TV screen. I know that you used to have to get a colour licence if you owned a VCR, because it had a tuner capable of receiving and recording pictures in colour.
Now that we've gone through digital switchover, there are no purely B&W TV tuners - every digital set-top box can receive colour pictures, even if the TV can't display them.
Surely, in this case, the Black and White licence is obsolete?
(Incidentally, I dropped my TV licence this year - I just wasn't using it enough to justify the cost. What little TV I view now is on-demand through the computer. With fibre-optic broadband - paid for with the money saved by not having a TV licence - I can receive an HD picture on BBC iPlayer and it's actually better than the old TV reception.)
They have, at least in the great majority of the UK.
You can get set top boxes to receive digital transmissions if you don't have a suitable TV. I'm sure these would work with a B&W TV if you wanted. I believe some groups (the elderly?) were offered subsidised set top boxes.
I was wondering about how it would work actually. I don't think B&W TVs have SCART inputs, so I suppose there are still settop boxes out there that can output a PAL antenna signal?
They have converter boxes. But as other commenters pointed out they may not actually have b&w sets but have merely "forgotten" to upgrade their licenses (at a savings of 100 pounds per year).
I wonder what the uptake levels of HD would be if there was a discount on the license fee for SD screens (basically the modern-day analog of the b/w -> color switchover)
The web has numerous examples of people with no TV, who have told the relevant body this, and yet nonetheless receive an endless stream of threatening letters. The letters tend to follow the same pattern; polite reminders to harsh reminders to threats of discovery and huge fines, and then back to polite reminders again. Essentially, their model is to assume that anyone without a TV is lying, and does have a TV. It's probably quite effective and certainly a lot cheaper than trying to keep track of who actually doesn't have a TV.
So, if you've got a TV (that you use to receive broadcast transmissions - you don't need a licence just to own the TV, you need it for some of its possible uses) in the UK and you have no TV licence, you can be pretty sure that you can ignore the letters and, should a private citizen working for Capita come to the door, you need not answer or let them in or even talk to them. The only way they could demand entry would be with a suitable court document and accompanied by an officer of the court (who frankly has better things to do with his time), but to get that document they need reasonable evidence, and simply not having a TV licence is not actually considered evidence of illegally using a TV to receive broadcast transmissions.