On Wednesday 12 August 2015 14:04:37 marti...@suddenlink.net wrote: > Now think, for a second how much money it costs to outfit > a van with high-quality broad-spectrum radio receivers, a person to > drive and another to tune and evaluate what he/she is receiving > and whether or not it is from a TV tuner or Heaven knows what > else.
They have a much simpler solution. They barely bother with the vans (they exist, I believe, though I have never seen one). They see a house. They see an electoral register. They assume a television. They check for a licence. No licence? They assume criminality. And start bullying. If you insist that you haven't got a television, they do seem to make some sort of effort to check, because I have not been in prison. But they continue to bully you. After all, you might buy or be given one. If you buy it from a shop, the shop has to tell the authorities, but you might buy one on eBay or from a neighbour. And you underestimate the cost, both in money terms and to society. Let us take the clichéd typical non-licence buyer: a single mother on a very low income. When she goes to prison for non-payment of her licence, her children go into care. Those children are almost inevitably damaged by our so-called "care" system, and society then has, often monetarily expensive, problems for years to come. The care alone, even were there no societal cost, costs several orders of magnitude more money than the £145.50 cost of a TV licence. The trial alone, too, will have cost more than that! Then there is the cost of keeping her in prison. And will she pay her TV licence next year? Probably not, because she still will chose to feed her children if she hasn't got enough money for both. And when she looks for a job, when her youngest child starts school, she will have difficulty getting one because she has a criminal record. Lisi