TV Licensing

TV Licensing releases 2014 Annual Review

TV Licensing’s Annual Report, published today, sets out TV Licensing’s main achievements for customers over the past year.

Highlights include:

• TV Licensing collected £3.7bn in revenue during the year, a £16.4m increase on the previous year.
• The cost of collecting the fee was £102m, down from £111m. This equates to 2.7p in each £1 collected, down from 3p last year, and 6.2p in 1991, when the BBC took over responsibility for collecting the fee.
• Licence fee evasion has remained steady at between five and six per cent.
• The majority of customers buy their TV Licence by Direct Debit (71.8%) though a small minority still pay by cheque (3.1%).

The report also highlights the work done by teams within TV Licensing and also with its external partners. TV Licensing’s extensive and growing partnership programme this year involved working with 66 national and 360 local organisations across the UK. Over the past 12 months TV Licensing has engaged with over 185 money advice organisations, 48 housing associations and 18 minority group organisations. Working with these organisations helped TV Licensing to raise awareness of when a licence is needed, the many ways to pay and the consequences of watching TV while being unlicensed to hard-to-reach and low income communities.

In addition, the TV Licensing customer service team dealt with 6.4m calls, 1.2m postal enquiries and 448,000 customer emails, whilst enquiry officers made 3.8m visits to unlicensed properties.

Pipa Doubtfire, Head of Revenue Management, TV Licensing, said:

Over the past year, the TV Licensing team has collected £3.7bn in licence fee income, and reduced the cost of collection by £9million to an all-time low.

At the same time as driving down our costs, we continued with our extensive work to help people to pay for a licence. We worked with more than 420 partner organisations up and down the country to reach those people who might struggle to pay for a licence, for whatever reason.

One of the stakeholders we have worked with this year, Jacqui Kennedy, Director of Regulation and Enforcement at Birmingham City Council, said:

TV Licensing is working alongside our initiative, the Financial Inclusion Partnership in Birmingham, to make people aware of various schemes in place designed to suit a range of financial circumstances and offering ways to spread the cost of a licence.