TV license fee clampdown puts BBC behind 12 per cent of criminal prosecutions
A clampdown on television viewers who fail to pay their license fee has put the BBC behind more 12 per cent of criminal prosecutions in the UK, it has emerged during a parliamentary question.
Last year the number of people prosecuted hit an all-time high as 180,000 people appeared before magistrates’ courts charged with evading the £145.50 annual fee.
This represents a rise of 15,000 from the previous year, extending a spell of rising prosecution rates as TV Licensing improves its systems for tracing the culprits.
It also means that TV licensing accounted for 12 per cent of magistrates’ total workload of 1.48m cases last year.
Of those frog marched before the courts 155,000 were convicted for not having a valid license, giving the individuals concerned a criminal record and a £1,000 fine as the issue is not treated as a civil matter in the same manner as utility bills and parking tickets.
The news dovetails with an ongoing scandal at the BBC over excessive pay-offs to departing top executives with £60m shelled out as severance, the equivalent of 412,000 licenses.
A spokesman for TV Licensing said: “We have a duty to enforce the law on behalf of the 95 per cent of people who pay. TV licence evasion cases take up a small proportion of court time as they are dealt with in bulk in dedicated sessions and very few people attend court.”