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Hundreds in Eastbourne caught without TV licence
HUNDREDS of people in Eastbourne were caught without a valid television licence in 2011.
More than 460 Eastbourne households were caught, TV Licensing revealed this week.
This compares to more than 1,060 in Brighton, 660 in Crawley, 400 in Worthing, and 340 in Hastings.
TV Licensing catches more than 1,000 evaders every day and there were 2,800 people caught watching TV illegally across East Sussex, more than 2,500 in West Sussex, and almost 390,000 across the UK.
However, the estimated evasion rate remains steady at around five per cent, as it has done for the last five years.
This means the vast majority of people, or 19 out of 20 households and businesses, are correctly licensed.
Pauline Gillingham, TV Licensing spokesperson for the South East, said, “TV viewing is as popular as ever, with the percentage of households who have a television set at 96.7 per cent, and it’s our role to make sure everyone is aware of when they need to be covered by a licence.
“On behalf of licence fee payers in Eastbourne, we are committed to tackling evasion and enforcing the law amongst the small minority who should pay, but don’t. It’s only fair.
“People are given every opportunity to pay, but, if they fail to do so and watch TV illegally, we will seek a prosecution.
“The penalty is a fine of up to £1,000, plus court costs and a victim surcharge.
“Anyone found guilty is also required to buy a TV Licence at £145.50 if they still need one or they could face a second prosecution. It’s really not worth the risk.”
TV Licensing wants to make it as easy as possible for people to pay for a TV Licence and therefore offers a number of ways to spread the cost, including Direct Debit and a weekly or monthly cash payment plan.
For more information visit www.tvlicensing.co.uk.
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Comments
There are 5 comments to this article
Page 1 of 1
moosh
Wednesday, February 8, 2012 at 06:29 AMNever paid for 1 and never will
pensive
Tuesday, February 7, 2012 at 08:58 PMIt's long time that the BBC's licence fee was abolished - there is an e-petition on that site which is calling for this - sign it if you agree - I have. Needs 100,000 signatures to get discussed in parliament and if enough of us get behind it, it could happen.
Eastbourne-pirate
Tuesday, February 7, 2012 at 06:55 PMDigital should be called ''seenothingatall'' Once you have avoided the soaps and singingdancing for idiots & any half hour slot with the letter X in it, All that's left is the news. It must be my age but the radio (4) provokes far more inspiration than anything on the TV.
roneoron
Tuesday, February 7, 2012 at 01:51 PMUncle refers to Part 4 of The Communications Act 2003 which states that you do not need a licence if you only use a TV receiver to watch videos or DVDs or as a monitor for gaming. Enquiry Officers have no right of entry unless they have a search warrant. As to whether detector vans and handheld detectors are phony, I don't know, but it sounds a bit urban mythy to me. Certainly TV Licensing seem to rely on rudeness and bullying to coerce people into buying a licence, as I found out when my free licence, 91 year old father in law, died. Is the licence worth the money? It used to be, but the plethora of cheapo reality competition, property, and cooking programmes we presently suffer are a big turn off. Digital? What a waste of money for a second rate service so that the Gov. can flog off the analogue channels at vast cost to the mobile phone industry! Digital TV seems to have to think about channel changing for 10 seconds before it actually does it. Tuning constantly has to be adjusted, and Freeview is 90% ads and old programmes that should have been long binned. And hardly green to have to bin all those perfectly good TV sets and recorders or to manufacture all those millions of set top boxes and other kit to receive digital. A vast con!
unklemunklestew
Tuesday, February 7, 2012 at 11:07 AMI take it that the 460 households were just let off and asked to buy a license as they weren’t prosecuted. I don’t think our court system could handle it. Truth of the matter is that the TV Licensing bods send out this sort of press release every 18 months as part of their campaign. They are left little choice as they have very little armoury in their fight against evaders. They can’t enter your property, taking you to court is very costly and proving you have broken the law is almost impossible. It’s an industry secret that you are allowed to own a TV receiver and not have a license, they even have to admit this on their site. So they have to resort to scare tactics, such as the phoney detector vans. I don’t have a TV License, I gave up watching live broadcasts 5 years ago after a row with the licensing corp., I wanted to stop payment as I was temporarily without a TV and they wouldn’t belive me and called me a criminal.
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