Licence Fee Evasion

An article in the Telegraph today claims that the real rate of TV Licence evasion is much higher than the BBC claims.

See this story.

Some of the assumptions used in this story appear wrong. In particular it is not valid to claim that everyone who is not paying by direct debit is trying to avoid paying at all.

There are 26.1 million households in the UK. If the BBC is really selling 25.4 million licences then that is an astonishingly high level of acceptance given the level of discontent with the BBC and the licence system in general. Our gut feeling is that the real rate of avoidance is likely to be higher than the official figure. This analysis does not really shed light on the issue though.

However we think the article is correct in its conclusions about the coming crisis for the BBC. After all that is what we have been saying for the past few months.