MONDAY 1 JULY 2002

MS SUE STREET, MR GREG DYKE, MR JOHN SMITH AND MS ZARIN PATEL

  180. I know but is there anything you can do about it? Is it obvious who you are, knocking at the door?
  (Mr Smith) Unless and until we get a search warrant, the only thing we can do is what we actually do.

  181. Is it obvious who is at the door?
  (Mr Smith) To them or to us?

  182. To them.
  (Mr Smith) Our guys wear a uniform.

  183. All you have to do is just not answer the door to the bloke or woman in the uniform. Do you not have plain clothes or something? It seems a ridiculous use of public money.
  (Mr Smith) I have to stand by what I said at the start, which is the deterrent effect of those guys going into housing estates with a uniform, really matters.

  184. Surely people talk. "They are in the area? What are we going to do?" "Well, just watch the telly and do not answer the door." This is ridiculous and you are wasting all these millions of visits.
  (Mr Smith) We will go for a search warrant if we feel we have enough evidence that somebody is watching a television set and not answering the door. In that situation, we will put something through the door that says, "We came today. You did not answer the door. If you have a television set, you need a licence."

  185. I am sure you do. I think Ms Patel said that one in five people who say they do not have a TV do. What is happening here is that the four out of five who do not have a TV you continue to harass, do you not?
  (Ms Patel) The proportion of visits we carry out to confirm no sets is a very tiny proportion, as it shows in that table. The great majority of the 3.5 million visits are to those who are unlicensed.

  186. You are knocking on the door and people are hiding in their houses. We found 460,000 people were caught evading licences. 72% of those pay. The other 135,000 are prosecuted and we were told 56% pay. Obviously, nearly half do not pay. What do they do? They continue not to pay and say, "I told you last time, Magistrate, I am not paying." What do you do with them and how many of them are there who are habitually consistent, repeat offenders who are not paying the fines?
  (Mr Smith) The figure in the NAO Report for the previous year was 40,000 people who were prosecuted a second time and, in the year just ended, that was 44,000 people.

  187. Were they the same people broadly? What was the overlap between those years?
  (Mr Smith) I do not know.

  188. Does the NAO know the cost to the taxpayer of 44% of the 135,000 prosecutions simply not paying again and again? The cost to the magistrates' courts must be more than the licence fee. Maybe we can have some information on that because these are public bodies wasting public money, taking people to court that they know will not pay.
  (Sir John Bourn) That links up with the discussion the Committee had last week about the problem that arose from the fact that only about two-thirds of the fines levied by the magistrates are paid.

  189. The BBC is feeding all these people in who they know will not pay. Have you databases of people you send to court who you know have not paid? Do you still continue to send them to court in the knowledge that they never pay?
  (Mr Smith) If somebody does not pay the first time round, we have a 100% policy of reprosecuting.

  190. It is a 100% policy of wasting public money. We know from the reports from the magistrates that these people do not pay.
  (Mr Smith) Are you suggesting we let them off?
  (Mr Dyke) Is that not a fundamental dilemma of every court system? If people decide they are not going to pay, do you therefore not let them not pay?

  191. Perhaps we should think of something else. Maybe you should go into dialogue with the government about how to deliver this. This is something that we are investigating but you should be saying to the government that these people will not pay. Perhaps you need another strategy.
  (Mr Dyke) We only prosecute people as a last resort. If they will pay their licence fee, we are happy.

  192. What I do not understand is why we have 3.5 million visits. Why cannot we just use vans? Would that not be more cost effective?
  (Mr Smith) No. What you really need is a whole package of things that add to the picture of making people feel uncomfortable.

  193. You seem to have that as a policy objective, making people feel uncomfortable.
  (Mr Smith) No, not at all. Our policy objective is to get people to pay. The fundamental difference in the ten years or so that we have been running this from the picture before is that our policy objective is to encourage people to pay. We don't want to take people to court.

  194. If 80% of the time there is nobody in or the house does not exist, would it not be better to send vans out and you can see straight away if there is a house there and find out whether there is someone watching the television and then target that house rather than all thee other houses? Would that not be more cost effective?
  (Mr Dyke) Vans are much more expensive than individuals. You send the van round after the individual has been.

  195. Do you have hand held technology so that you do not need the van?
  (Mr Smith) The BBC's R&D department has developed a device that can be taken round in the hand which the enquiry officers have and that will detect whether or not a television is being used.

  196. With Argos, Sainsbury's and Safeway, do you find these big operators regularly going to court and paying a few quid here and there; meanwhile saving thousands of pounds?
  (Ms Patel) A good example is Tesco, where they have now gone to electronic point of sale notification as a result of the prosecution we undertook, so they do not want to go through this process. They would rather notify and obey the law.

  197. The second homes, students, halls of residence, homes of lodgers and all these people who have not got licences and that is double the amount of non-payment: is there a new action plan to combat that or is it the same as before? Has it led to some operational change?
  (Mr Smith) Yes. These are the new premises that we have been pursuing for some years.

  198. We noticed the Post Office was fined £20 million for not delivering. There were problems with Envision and there was a consortium with the Post Office but were they fined? You lost much more because they did not fulfil their sales target and they lost their commission. Is that right, or did you fine them?
  (Mr Smith) In a contract of this nature you do not get, nor would you ever expect to get, a contractor guaranteeing a level of licence fee sales when the ratio between the cost of the operation and the cost of the income is so phenomenal. It is not in their favour. What you have with a contractor is a series of incentives, penalties and deadlines, measures and mechanisms to ensure that the evasion rate keeps coming down and the cost of collection doesn't go up.

  199. One of your reasons for switching from Consignia to Capita was that you were already constantly reducing evasion rates and therefore you needed a fresh pair of hands and new marketing so you switched. That seemed to me completely on its head logic.
  (Mr Dyke) That was the first switch. The second switch was not of our choice. The company did not wish to continue because they were losing too much money in the process.