They send out threatening-sounding letters to every household that hasn’t paid. You can see examples of the letters here. If you’re careful you can spot the massive differences between what they actually say and what they want the recipients to be scared into thinking they say.
So… is there some kind of punishment in the UK for avoiding one’s license fee? As I said, while it’s a legal obligation in Japan, there is no punishment for not paying aside from being harassed by field agents.
What happens if you refuse to pay? Are you flogged? Drawn & quartered? Forced to watch Triangle?
The TV licensing people tried to claim that they still used detector vans just last year:
But nothing in that statement is inconsistent with dummy vans, or even detector vans only existing in people’s minds. Another big difference between what they actually say and what they hope people read.
Do the TV detector vans also come from the Ministry of Housinge?
A fine of up to £1000.
Failure to pay the fine can land you in prison.
ninja’d
No, you still pay for a TV licence with cable or Satellite.
This has led to many poor people (mostly women as they are single mothers or at home when the agents call) being imprisoned. There are attempts being made to ensure that future action involves civil liability and attachment of earning rather than imprisonment.
I support a public broadcasting system (having experience the difference between watchability between the US and UK over the decades) but see the licence fee as very regressive. I think that the domestic tax on housing and people (the Community Charge) should be increased by an equivalent amount to make it fairer- poorer people would pay less or nothing at all whereas comfortable people would pay more, and all collection problems would be minimised.
They have been instructed to stop doing this and their advertising has become less threatening following a long campaign against their intimidatory practices
http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/assets/files/pdf/review_report_research/tvl/tvl_report.pdf
As it is now possible to stream most TV over the internet, collection is going to become increasingly difficult unless some sort of tax rather than charge is used. Most university students watch streamed TV on laptops with virtually complete impunity.
The other problem for enforcing any such charge for streaming is that because of the method of transmission, the longer you watch a channel on streaming, the further behind the broadcast time you get- I often stream BBC news in my study on a computer and this needs to be reset every hour by 2 or 3 minutes to catch up with the news on time.
That’s just recently been changed - it comes out of licence fee revenue now.
Re iPlayer and the like not being (easily) accessible outside the UK, I imagine that is as much to do with broadcasters only having rights to show the stuff in the UK as it is about stopping freeloaders watching it.
I thought like that, but look at it this way:
It’s not a matter of whether you think you’re likely to get caught. It’s whether the risk, and lack of peace of mind is worth it to you (also morality plays a part of course, but I’d say for many people they’ve never even stopped to think if it’s immoral to watch BBC for free).
So it wouldn’t surprise me if many students do dodge this fee, both now and in the past. They generally have little to lose and are at a stage of life where they can tell themselves they’re sticking it to the man, or whatever.
But for many households, that are firmly settled at one address, they’d rather just cough up and have peace of mind, while feeling like the good guy, than fearing a knock on their door.
And if anything, fear of the knock on the door has become more true than in the past. Many households have multiple devices that can view live TV, including the big LCD in the lounge.
Now the mythical scary TV Licensing guy doesn’t even need to set foot in your home; imagine the embarrassment of saying (implausibly) you don’t own a TV, when your son arrives home watching TV on his tablet.
Actually, students using devices with internal batteries are covered by their parents’ licence.
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Back in my day, we were allowed a small set, up to a certain size screen. I couldn’t afford one of my own, mind you, so I watched the one in the common room.
Is the license for each device, or each person?
Over here the licence is for the address.
I’m in Ireland - nobody fought any revolution against us! 
It’s for each household, and covers all people living there, and all devices.
How did they enforce this? Send somebody to your house and see if you had colour* ?
Being a non-Brit, my blind guess is that most of those 50,000 “black and white” licenses were just annual renewals of a license that had first been granted in the 1960’s. Is my guess logical?
*heh, heh…Just for you blokes, I remembered to add the “u”.
Even though it’s totally unncessary.
If that’s at me, yeah I know this.
What I’m saying is the fee is levied on households, not devices. So the question isn’t whether they can know if you’re streaming TV on your laptop.
It’s whether the typical household owns something like a conventional TV (still yes in most cases) and whether the typical household would not want to take the risk (still yes IMO).
Note: I’m not defending the license fee, just questioning the idea that being able to stream TV and watch from whatever device makes it harder to administrate or enforce.
It seems to me that the government is paying for the BBC, which I understand is run by the government with the license fee, as tolls in some areas of the US pay for road construction.
Are their any broadcasters in Britain besides the BBC? Are television stations and cable companies run by the government?
And I bet you don’t pay the outrageous cell phone and internet rates the USA does.
