Licence fee evasion: 15% of all prosecutions?
Should we be compelled by law to pay the TV licence fee if we object to the output of the BBC?
This was the question put to the test by the Telegraph’s Charles Moore when he refused to renew his payment in the wake of the ‘Sachsgate’ scandal which engulfed the corporation in 2008.
Today, Mr Moore gives an account of his ultimate defeat in the courts, when he was forced to pay a fine of £262 for his defiance.
But in his blast against the enforcement of licence fee payments, Mr Moore quotes some eye-catching statistics.
The Claim
The piece suggests that cases relating to non-payment of licence fees account for a significant proportion of traffic in the courts.
“Perhaps the most extraordinary thing I have discovered over the past 20 months is the vast tide of small-scale human misery which the licence fee causes. In 2008-09, there were 168,800 prosecutions for licence fee evasion. That is nearly 15 per cent of all prosecutions.”
Does the licence fee really account for such large chunk of legal proceedings?
Analysis
Full Fact contacted the Ministry of Justice for the figures quoted above. However we were told that such information could only be given through a Freedom of Information request.
Not the sorts to wait around, we decided to see what figures were out there to support Mr Moore’s claim.
The TV Licensing Authority were able to confirm to Full Fact that the figure for the number of prosecutions in 2008-9 was actually 160,831 – nearly 8,000 fewer than Mr Moore claimed.
Even if we accept the slightly higher figure, do these cases account for 15 per cent of prosecutions?
There are some difficulties in investigating the figures. Firstly, Ministry of Justice court figures are produced in relation to the calendar year, while Charles Moore quotes a figure for 2008-09.
However it is possible to get a sense of whether the percentage used by Mr Moore is accurate, by comparing the number of prosecutions for England and Wales given in the 2008 Ministry of Justice statistics, with the licence fee prosecutions for the same year and area given to Parliament.
In a written answer to a parliamentary question the 2008 figure for TV licence fee prosecutions in England and Wales was 134,518.
The Ministry of Justice directed us to figures which suggest that in 2008 there were 1.92 million prosecutions in magistrates courts in England and Wales. The 134,518 licence fee prosecutions in that year therefore account for seven per cent of total prosecutions.
Another Ministry of Justice report quotes a figure of 1.64 million cases prosecuted in magistrates courts, yet even this would only leave licence fee cases accounting for eight per cent of cases.
Even if it was sentencing rather than prosecutions being discussed the figure still appears inaccurate. As the figures in the above written reply to the parliamentary question on the issue shows, there were 120,785 people found guilty of licence fee evasion.
The total number of sentences handed out by the magistrates courts was 1.29 million , leaving licence fee related sentencing accounting for roughly 10 per cent of the total.
Of course, such numbers do not completely disprove the numbers given by Mr Moore. As stated they only apply to England and Wales and apply to 2008 as opposed to 2008-09. Yet the divergence between the figures quoted on prosecutions does raise questions about the claim.
The second problem is that Mr Moore did not specify that his claim relates to solely to magistrates courts. Given this omission it is worth considering the number of cases prosecuted elsewhere.
For instance, Figure 1.1 in this Ministry of Justice report shows that 88,500 cases are dealt with within the Crown courts. If such figures were considered in the calculations above then the percentage accounted for by licence free prosecutions would be even lower.
Conclusion
The figures we have been able to obtain do raise questions about the claim made by Charles Moore.
While it is conceivable that the former Spectator editor has had access to figures unavailable to us at Full Fact, the evidence we have found relating to England and Wales suggests the claim could be exaggerated, not least because it appears to only apply to magistrates courts.
Given that such doubts exist over the figures, it is perhaps surprising that Mr Moore did not specify where he got his figures from.
However, this does not take away from the point made in the article about people facing the threat of legal action for failing to pay for a service which they may not watch, like or support at all.
As Mr Moore writes: “How weird it is that in a free society we have to pay money to a particular corporation before we are allowed to watch the telly in our own homes”.
Beyond the specific figures it seems important to ask whether so much court time should be taken up with those who have no will, or in some cases ability, to pay the licence fee.
Patrick Casey
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