on 4 October 2009Incomprehensible regulations mindlessly enforced: a reliable staple of modern consumer news, represented most recently by TV Licensing’s push to get business owners signed up. Now that you can watch TV via the Internet on anything from a laptop to a Lollipop (or whatever LG’s latest handset is called), the rules are impossible to interpret, say bewildered punters. Nonsense, say the TV Licensing people, it’s all perfectly straightforward. Oh yeah?
First off, in case you were wondering, TV showrooms that play every terrestrial channel all day on a wall of screens are exempt from licensing; they don’t pay a penny. That’s not for any logical reason, it’s just an exemption that somebody stuck in when the rules were made, presumably to facilitate the marketing of this new-fangled ‘television’ thingy. But if you just have one screen sitting in the corner of a newsagent’s, you’re supposed to pay your £142.50 – even if you and all your employees already have their own TV licences. And the same applies if you ever watch telly on your work computer, or allow customers to do so.
The Beeb’s Harriet Oliver takes up the story:
[TV Licensing spokesperson] Ian Fannon told BBC News that the rules were quite simple. ‘You need a licence if you are watching programmes as they are broadcast. At a business, the same rules apply.’
He says [employees or customers watching TV on business premises] will be covered by their own licences if they are using mobiles. [Business owners need only] worry about devices like office computers which are plugged into the mains, making them ‘legally installed’.
So will businesses be left alone if they insist their staff never watch television at work? Not necessarily, Mr Fannon says.
Quite simple then.
Very few people in the UK understand how TV licensing works; chat forums are full of people confidently offering contradictory advice. Test yourself if you like. True or false:
1. You don’t need a licence if you own a TV set or other equipment capable of receiving a broadcast TV signal but never use it to watch broadcast TV
2. You only need a licence to watch BBC broadcasts
3. Your licence covers you, not your premises
4. Landlords, not tenants, are responsible for ensuring their premises have a TV licence
5. The same rules apply to watching TV on the Internet as to using a TV set with an aerial
How did you do?
1. You don’t need a licence if you own a TV set or other equipment capable of receiving a broadcast TV signal but never use it to watch broadcast TV
True. Owning a TV set in itself doesn’t make you liable to pay the TV Licence fee. Despite this, retailers have been obliged since 1967 to take your name and address and pass them to TV Licensing when you buy any TV-related device.
TV Licensing’s charming list of ‘imaginative’ licensing excuses, an unashamed celebration of the sarcastic schadenfreude of the small man with a shiny badge, delights in satirising women who’ve allowed Enforcement Officers into their homes to ‘check’ that they have no TV. (The Enforcement Officer in these stories is always a man.) The desirability of sending out random idiots with instructions to demand entry to potentially vulnerable people’s homes is not discussed; nor is the requirement to prove that TV sets not only exist, but have been used to watch live broadcasts.
This raises the obvious question of whether citizens are obliged to allow TV Licensing Enforcement Officers into their homes. Have a look for the answer on www.tvlicensing.co.uk. You won’t find it.
2. You only need a licence to watch BBC broadcasts
False. Watching TV programmes from any source ‘as they’re being shown’ requires a licence. Erm… How would you be watching them if they weren’t being shown? This raises the obvious question of whether watching only foreign satellite broadcasts, for example, requires a TV licence. Have a look for the answer on www.tvlicensing.co.uk. You won’t find it.
3. Your licence covers you, not your premises
This was a trick question. Well, actually a straightforward question with a trick answer. If you have a TV licence for your house, it covers your premises, in the sense that you can use as many TVs as you like within your home, and other people can come round and watch them too. As long as they’re not lodgers, who need their own licence. Family members and live-in employees are OK, but not if they have their own self-contained accommodation. So if Granny watches telly in her granny annexe, she needs her own licence. This raises the obvious question of how you can tell whether an area of your home, which is part of a single property for all legal purposes, may nonetheless be unilaterally declared ‘self-contained’ by TV Licensing. Have a look for the answer on www.tvlicensing.co.uk. You won’t find it.
It also covers you, in the sense that you’re allowed to use your own battery-powered devices to watch TV elsewhere – so it’s OK to watch on your iPhone on somebody else’s premises, as Mr Fannon mentioned. Then again, in reality, thanks to the iPhone’s crap battery, doing this would require your iPhone to be plugged into the mains. Plugging something into the mains counts as ‘installing’ it, which means you need a separate licence for the location where you watch it. This raises the obvious question of whether or not plugging in a mobile device just to charge it up is installing it. Have a look for the answer on www.tvlicensing.co.uk. You won’t find it.
When you live in a shared house, things get trickier. If all the tenants have signed a joint tenancy agreement, as used to be the norm for students, you only need one TV licence for the house. If you all have separate contracts, as is the norm for HMOs in general and increasingly common for students, you each need a separate licence, though you don’t need an additional licence for any TV in a communal area, as each of your licences also covers this (try Venn-diagramming that).
Unfortunately, tenants – especially students, another group regularly singled out for targeting by TV Licensing – often have little or no clue what kind of agreement they’ve signed, which is why there’s so much law on the books to protect them against landlords slipping rubbish into their contracts and then saying, ‘Well, you signed it.’ Why no consumer legislation to protect them against idiotically arbitrary TV licensing rules?
It’s not as if this is just a technicality. One houseful of seven people is paying £142.50; next door, another is paying £1000. Or if they’re not, and they get caught, they could each have to pay a £1000 fine. Unless they do have a TV licence between them, in which case the person whose name happens to be on it presumably is deemed innocent, while the other six are lawbreakers. Has anyone ever sat down and thought this through?
If you rent rooms by the night, things get even trickier. Hotel owners need a ‘hotel and mobile units TV Licence’, which costs ‘less than a regular TV Licence’. By less, of course, they mean more. You need a licence for each ‘unit of accommodation’. Reasonably, a multiple licence for up to 15 units is available at the same price as an ordinary TV licence, currently £142.50. If you have more than 15 units, however, you need an extra licence for every additional five. Yes, the more you buy, the more expensive it gets – it’s Lewis Carroll via George Orwell! Bear in mind that every guest, except those from outside the UK, is already paying for their own TV licence at home. Maybe they could start adding VAT as well?
4. Landlords, not tenants, are responsible for ensuring their premises have a TV licence
Another trick question. We’ve covered the two completely different licensing models that may apply to shared houses with the same number of tenants. But who’s responsible for figuring it all out and paying up: the landlord or the tenant? Fortunately, the TV Licensing advice makes it crystal clear:
If you let your property and you provide a TV for tenants to use, it is your responsibility to ensure that the address has a valid TV Licence.
So it’s the landlord’s responsibility. Oh, wait:
I’m a tenant. Is it my responsibility to provide a TV Licence?
Yes.
Uh?
Ultimately, if your property is unlicensed, both you and your tenants are responsible and either one of you could face prosecution and a fine of up to £1,000.
Either one of us? Depending on which way the wind’s blowing, or some other factor? Can we do anything to clarify the situation?
If the lease clearly states that tenants are responsible for any necessary TV Licence, they should buy it.
Great – another reason to pore through the tenancy contract small print that other branches of the state have spent years cutting out. Don’t you just love joined-up government?
5. The same rules apply to watching TV on the Internet as to using a TV set with an aerial
True. Sort of. ‘It makes no difference what equipment you use - whether it’s a laptop, PC, mobile phone, digital box, DVD recorder or a TV set.’ Bearing in mind that: ‘You do not need a TV Licence to view video clips on the internet, as long as what you are viewing is not being shown on TV at the same time as you are viewing it.’
Not being shown on TV at the same time? How do you know? Shown by whom, on whose TV, where? And why does it matter? Another obvious question you won’t find answered on www.tvlicensing.co.uk. (Along with: how the heck did a DVD recorder get classed as broadcast receiving equipment?)
Confusing as all this may be, you’re legally obliged to master it. Remember, just buying a TV licence doesn’t get you off the hook – you may need more than one. ‘It is a criminal offence to use TV receiving equipment to watch or record TV programmes without a valid licence, and there’s no excuse for doing so,’ concludes the website.
Well, how about this for an excuse: your rules suck, nobody understands them, and in case you didn’t get the memo, the concept of ‘broadcast TV’ has about eight minutes left before it’s utterly meaningless. If you can’t cope with the 21st Century, the least you can do is hold off on the self-righteous threats until you get yourselves sorted out.
adambanksdotcom @allpointsnorth There's a fine line between the WSJ style sheet and the box set of Blackadder
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And, of course, all this bull helps no-one, not least the BBC. The whole concept of the TV licence is outdated and irks too many people. It should be scrapped entirely and the BBC funded through standard taxation. That way, the BBC remains relatively intact and people won’t know/realise what they’re spending on it anyway.
When I were a lad, and we couldn’t get TV (it’s grim, further north then Oop North), we bought a TV just so we could watch videos, and the nice man in the shop removed the tuner so that we wouldn’t have to pay the licence fee. I believe at the time, you required a licence simply because you owned a device capable of receiving broadcasts, but that may have changed. (Actually, please god it’s changed, as otherwise, with the advent of t’internet, everything with a sodding IP address is capable of receiving a ‘broadcast’.)
Until the mid-1990s retailers of television receiving equipment required a TV Dealer Demonstration Licence, which cost £7 for 5 years. The licence was abolished under the Conservatives’ deregulation initiative as a burden on business! Now TV dealers have a registration scheme instead, with no fee.
If watching television programmes via the Internet does not involve “live” or “near-live” broadcasts, then no TV Licence is necessary. Otherwise it is.
I’ve never heard of lodgers having to have their own TV Licence. I believe it is only those in houses in multiple occupation (such as a student dwelling without shared living space), where separate TV Licences would be required.
@Kris Jones:
“I’ve never heard of lodgers having to have their own TV Licence. I believe it is only those in houses in multiple occupation (such as a student dwelling without shared living space), where separate TV Licences would be required.”
I’m sure a lot of other people believe that, because it makes sense. But no. See http://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/information/conditions.jsp#link3:
“What does your licence not cover?
* Parts of your premises exclusively occupied by others, such as tenants, lodgers, paying guests.
* Self contained units on the premises.
* Any parts of your premises occupied by others by contractual or other arrangement (except parts of a private dwelling).”
Lordy.