There’s a simple way of dealing with the BBC’s TV licence bullies

Congratulations to the Daily Mail for exposing the unpleasant methods by which TV Licensing’s staff make people pay their television licence fees. Capita, the company that does the dirty work for the BBC, encourages its employees to use ‘ruthless and underhand tactics’ to collect the money, says the Mail. The paper offers painful examples of the victims — ‘RAF man with dementia, mum in a women’s refuge’. It could have added ‘veteran Spectator columnist’, since these activities were first exposed on this page in 2006, when I got fed up with being pursued by Capita to buy a TV licence for a flat without a television.

The Mail correctly identifies the unpleasant incentive system, but it doesn’t get to the heart of the issue. Indeed, it unwittingly compounds the problem by referring to the licence-fee collectors as ‘officials’. They are not officials, but it is central to their bluff that people think they are.