Post by Teddy Bear on Oct 5, 2013 23:09:37 GMT
I've known about the deceit employed by the BBC concerning their TVL 'detector vans' for quite some time. It was a common point of discussion in the anti-TVL website that we used to link to here, until unfortunately it appears to have been hit by hackers and so far hasn't recovered.
Glad to say there's another site that has been up and running, and we do link to it here. They too do an excellent job of advising people about their rights surrounding the license fee.
Good to see the following article in the Mail, and that people will now be even more empowered to stop paying their licence fee. The way the BBC and their agents have grossly exaggerated their powers over the public to scare residents into paying the licence fee for fear of possible consequences, shows a particular dishonesty that we see in many areas related to the BBC.
Glad to say there's another site that has been up and running, and we do link to it here. They too do an excellent job of advising people about their rights surrounding the license fee.
Good to see the following article in the Mail, and that people will now be even more empowered to stop paying their licence fee. The way the BBC and their agents have grossly exaggerated their powers over the public to scare residents into paying the licence fee for fear of possible consequences, shows a particular dishonesty that we see in many areas related to the BBC.
Are TV detector vans just a cunning con trick? For decades it's been claimed they trap licence cheats. In fact, they've never led to a single prosecution
By Guy Adams
Under the cover of darkness, a light blue van with two huge rotating aerials fixed to its roof drives slowly down a residential street.
A camera reveals that in the back, twiddling a set of controls that might have been pinched from a Thunderbirds spaceship, sits a middle-aged man wearing a tweed jacket and flamboyant moustache.
‘Yes!’ he declares, peering conspiratorially through a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles. ‘There’s a TV set on at No 5. It’s in the front room. And they’re watching . . . Columbo!’
The camera pans out to show a team of sinister looking heavies leaping from the van. ‘If you don’t have a TV licence, it won’t take us long to find you,’ a narrator informs viewers. ‘Don’t get a fine. Get a licence!’
This famous 20-second advert aired on the BBC hundreds of times during the Seventies, becoming as embedded in contemporary culture as parka jackets, sideburns and the Bay City Rollers.
Terrified by its depiction of vans that could see through living room walls, a generation of Britons was cowed into lining up at the Post Office to buy a TV licence.
So far, so effective; yet conspiracy theorists have long maintained that the menacing TV commercial is actually a cynical and deeply misleading piece of government propaganda.
The ubiquitous TV detector van that it portrays doesn’t really exist, they claim. Indeed, the supposedly commonplace vehicles have never been widely used on Britain’s streets.
Many believe they were paraded across TV screens — and are still used in press releases — as part of a dishonest PR stunt. The chance of one driving down your street is almost nil, they allege.
‘Detector vans are a myth,’ the UKIP MEP Gerard Batten, a long-time campaigner against the licence fee, told me this week.
‘Prosecution [for not having a TV licence] depends on the accused being caught in the act of watching live broadcasts, or admitting to it. The non-existent threat of Detector Van evidence is just a means of getting suspects to incriminate themselves.’
Sceptics such as Batten point out there isn’t a single documented case in British legal history in which so-called ‘detection evidence’ from vans has been used to prosecute a licence fee evader.
This was, sheepishly, confirmed by the BBC in 2011 in response to a (hitherto unreported) Freedom of Information request.
Sceptics also wonder why the BBC has always refused to either say how many of the vehicles it owns, or to answer questions about how they work, who operates them, and where they are used.
Instead, the Corporation’s spokesmen have for decades told reporters that revealing such information ‘might be useful to people trying to evade the licence fee’.
All of which has only added to the weight of doubt regarding the very existence of the vans.
This week the subject was thrown into the news following the leak of an internal BBC memo.
The 18-page document, obtained by the Radio Times, laid bare in great detail the Corporation’s on-going efforts to target unlicensed viewers, more and more of whom are being pursued for evasion because they don’t realise you need a licence to watch live TV on smartphones or tablets.
It revealed, for example, there are currently 334 ‘enforcement officers’ working in the UK, an increase of 20 per cent on last year.
Meanwhile, roughly 5.8 per cent of households evade the £145.50 licence fee, up from 5.2 per cent in 2012.
Yet nowhere in this detailed and supposedly authoritative document was there a single mention of the fabled TV detector vans, or of how they may be catching cheats.
The revelation was seized upon by media commentators. One national newspaper reported it under the headline: ‘TV Detector vans: a work of fiction?’
In response, the BBC insisted the vans ‘do exist’ but refused to answer further questions.
So what has been going on?
This week, more than 60 years after TV detector vans were first unveiled, I managed to establish the truth behind the use of these controversial surveillance vehicles.
The key to the mystery lay not with the BBC, but in the archives of the Post Office Vehicle Club (POVC), an organisation of 200 enthusiasts devoted to cars, vans and lorries owned by the postal service.
Christopher Hogan, editor of the club’s newsletter, explained that, until 2002, the Royal Mail was in charge of TV licence collection and enforcement.
And, he told me: ‘We know details about every vehicle it used, including their serial number, going back to 1906.’
The club therefore has records of every single TV detector van that was in operation between 1952, when they were first rolled-out, to 2002, when the Royal Mail lost the contract for licence enforcement.
These confirm some vehicles existed — but there have never been more than 20 or so at any one time.
This appears to confirm suspicions that detector vans always were — and almost certainly still are — largely a propaganda tool.
Their story begins in the Fifties, when the Post Office announced, with some fanfare, it had acquired a ‘fleet’ of converted Hillman Minx and Morris Oxford estate cars, which had vast triangular aerials attached to their roofs.
In the event, however, the POVC records reveal that only nine of these were ever in service. The early Sixties saw another ‘fleet’ of Commer detector vans unveiled with great fanfare.
But, again, archives show that only 11 of these were used at any one time.
A few years later, another ten Commers were introduced, bringing the total number of detector vans to 21.
This quantity was maintained throughout the Seventies, Eighties (when first Dodge and then Leyland supplied new vans) and Nineties, when eventually Ford Transits were introduced.
It continued until 2002, when licence enforcement was handed to the outsourcing firm Capita.
Given that roughly 4,000 people are prosecuted for licence fee evasion every week, the usefulness of detector vans, in tracking down offenders, is highly debatable.
Indeed, TV licensing catches all but a tiny minority of cheats by the very low-tech technique of sending inspectors to knock on their doors.
Although ‘enforcement officers’ have no official powers of entry, they are trained in either talking their way across the threshold, or tricking homeowners into confessing they have been watching TV illegally.
Vintage car enthusiast Martin Maltas owns one of the few Seventies detector vans still in existence, a converted Dodge Spacevan.
He worked in TV licence enforcement in Harrogate for four years in the early Eighties, but never saw a single detector van.
Maltas adds, however, that his father occasionally used one while doing the same job in the Sixties.
‘I’ve talked to Dad and a lot of other people who worked in them and the whole point of the vans was their scare factor,’ he tells me.
‘They’d put adverts in the local paper saying “TV detector vans are coming to your town”. Then they would be driven around with their huge yellow aerials going around, to make sure they were seen.’
The detection equipment on the vans theoretically worked by picking up a signal that was emitted by the oscillator on TV sets.
However, it was notoriously hard to operate, and almost useless at pinpointing televisions in blocks of flats and terraced homes, where there would be many TVs in close proximity.
Indeed, an un-named caller to Radio 2 this week, who said he worked on one such vehicle in the Eighties and Nineties, claimed the equipment was rarely switched on.
He said: ‘There were aerials on the roof, connected to nothing. We called it flag-waving: driving around to show people we were about.’
Other recent correspondents to newspapers have suggested many vans carried no equipment at all.
Since 2002, when the Royal Mail stopped running vans, analogue TVs have been replaced by digital ones, so old detection equipment would be obsolete.
Meanwhile, hostility to the licence fee has grown in tandem with the explosion in Freeview and satellite channels, which means people spend less time watching the BBC.
In a bid to persuade them to pay up, the Corporation claims today’s enforcement officers have hand-held detectors that can pinpoint TVs ‘within 20 seconds’.
But they refuse to explain how these devices work or how many are in use.
The number of detection vans is also a secret. However, a 2009 procurement document seen by the Mail states the BBC was at this time seeking to ‘enhance the current fleet of vans by building a further fleet of vans (minimum five)’.
That suggests there could be as few as ten in operation — one for every 2.5 million households.
Interestingly, the BBC has since given evidence to the Information Commissioner arguing (successfully) that it should not be required to disclose details of the fleet under the Freedom of Information Act.
Its submission, which has again been seen by this newspaper, argues that making such information public would ‘change the public’s perception of the effectiveness of detector vans’.
It further warns: ‘If the deterrent effect of television detector vans is lost . . . a significant number of people would decide not to pay their licence fee.’
In other words, if the truth about these sinister vehicles which supposedly haunt our cul-de-sacs — not to mention the men in moustaches who operate them — ever gets out, then the BBC reckons we’ll stop being scared of them.
- Detector Vans were heavily promoted by the BBC, who claimed they can detect working TV sets
- It has even been claimed they are almost entirely ineffective
- BBC has avoided spelling out how many detector vans there are
- But they have never led to a single person being punished
By Guy Adams
Under the cover of darkness, a light blue van with two huge rotating aerials fixed to its roof drives slowly down a residential street.
A camera reveals that in the back, twiddling a set of controls that might have been pinched from a Thunderbirds spaceship, sits a middle-aged man wearing a tweed jacket and flamboyant moustache.
‘Yes!’ he declares, peering conspiratorially through a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles. ‘There’s a TV set on at No 5. It’s in the front room. And they’re watching . . . Columbo!’
The camera pans out to show a team of sinister looking heavies leaping from the van. ‘If you don’t have a TV licence, it won’t take us long to find you,’ a narrator informs viewers. ‘Don’t get a fine. Get a licence!’
This famous 20-second advert aired on the BBC hundreds of times during the Seventies, becoming as embedded in contemporary culture as parka jackets, sideburns and the Bay City Rollers.
Terrified by its depiction of vans that could see through living room walls, a generation of Britons was cowed into lining up at the Post Office to buy a TV licence.
So far, so effective; yet conspiracy theorists have long maintained that the menacing TV commercial is actually a cynical and deeply misleading piece of government propaganda.
The ubiquitous TV detector van that it portrays doesn’t really exist, they claim. Indeed, the supposedly commonplace vehicles have never been widely used on Britain’s streets.
Many believe they were paraded across TV screens — and are still used in press releases — as part of a dishonest PR stunt. The chance of one driving down your street is almost nil, they allege.
‘Detector vans are a myth,’ the UKIP MEP Gerard Batten, a long-time campaigner against the licence fee, told me this week.
‘Prosecution [for not having a TV licence] depends on the accused being caught in the act of watching live broadcasts, or admitting to it. The non-existent threat of Detector Van evidence is just a means of getting suspects to incriminate themselves.’
Sceptics such as Batten point out there isn’t a single documented case in British legal history in which so-called ‘detection evidence’ from vans has been used to prosecute a licence fee evader.
This was, sheepishly, confirmed by the BBC in 2011 in response to a (hitherto unreported) Freedom of Information request.
Sceptics also wonder why the BBC has always refused to either say how many of the vehicles it owns, or to answer questions about how they work, who operates them, and where they are used.
Instead, the Corporation’s spokesmen have for decades told reporters that revealing such information ‘might be useful to people trying to evade the licence fee’.
All of which has only added to the weight of doubt regarding the very existence of the vans.
This week the subject was thrown into the news following the leak of an internal BBC memo.
The 18-page document, obtained by the Radio Times, laid bare in great detail the Corporation’s on-going efforts to target unlicensed viewers, more and more of whom are being pursued for evasion because they don’t realise you need a licence to watch live TV on smartphones or tablets.
It revealed, for example, there are currently 334 ‘enforcement officers’ working in the UK, an increase of 20 per cent on last year.
Meanwhile, roughly 5.8 per cent of households evade the £145.50 licence fee, up from 5.2 per cent in 2012.
Yet nowhere in this detailed and supposedly authoritative document was there a single mention of the fabled TV detector vans, or of how they may be catching cheats.
The revelation was seized upon by media commentators. One national newspaper reported it under the headline: ‘TV Detector vans: a work of fiction?’
In response, the BBC insisted the vans ‘do exist’ but refused to answer further questions.
So what has been going on?
This week, more than 60 years after TV detector vans were first unveiled, I managed to establish the truth behind the use of these controversial surveillance vehicles.
The key to the mystery lay not with the BBC, but in the archives of the Post Office Vehicle Club (POVC), an organisation of 200 enthusiasts devoted to cars, vans and lorries owned by the postal service.
Christopher Hogan, editor of the club’s newsletter, explained that, until 2002, the Royal Mail was in charge of TV licence collection and enforcement.
And, he told me: ‘We know details about every vehicle it used, including their serial number, going back to 1906.’
The club therefore has records of every single TV detector van that was in operation between 1952, when they were first rolled-out, to 2002, when the Royal Mail lost the contract for licence enforcement.
These confirm some vehicles existed — but there have never been more than 20 or so at any one time.
This appears to confirm suspicions that detector vans always were — and almost certainly still are — largely a propaganda tool.
Their story begins in the Fifties, when the Post Office announced, with some fanfare, it had acquired a ‘fleet’ of converted Hillman Minx and Morris Oxford estate cars, which had vast triangular aerials attached to their roofs.
In the event, however, the POVC records reveal that only nine of these were ever in service. The early Sixties saw another ‘fleet’ of Commer detector vans unveiled with great fanfare.
But, again, archives show that only 11 of these were used at any one time.
A few years later, another ten Commers were introduced, bringing the total number of detector vans to 21.
This quantity was maintained throughout the Seventies, Eighties (when first Dodge and then Leyland supplied new vans) and Nineties, when eventually Ford Transits were introduced.
It continued until 2002, when licence enforcement was handed to the outsourcing firm Capita.
Given that roughly 4,000 people are prosecuted for licence fee evasion every week, the usefulness of detector vans, in tracking down offenders, is highly debatable.
Indeed, TV licensing catches all but a tiny minority of cheats by the very low-tech technique of sending inspectors to knock on their doors.
Although ‘enforcement officers’ have no official powers of entry, they are trained in either talking their way across the threshold, or tricking homeowners into confessing they have been watching TV illegally.
Vintage car enthusiast Martin Maltas owns one of the few Seventies detector vans still in existence, a converted Dodge Spacevan.
He worked in TV licence enforcement in Harrogate for four years in the early Eighties, but never saw a single detector van.
Maltas adds, however, that his father occasionally used one while doing the same job in the Sixties.
‘I’ve talked to Dad and a lot of other people who worked in them and the whole point of the vans was their scare factor,’ he tells me.
‘They’d put adverts in the local paper saying “TV detector vans are coming to your town”. Then they would be driven around with their huge yellow aerials going around, to make sure they were seen.’
The detection equipment on the vans theoretically worked by picking up a signal that was emitted by the oscillator on TV sets.
However, it was notoriously hard to operate, and almost useless at pinpointing televisions in blocks of flats and terraced homes, where there would be many TVs in close proximity.
Indeed, an un-named caller to Radio 2 this week, who said he worked on one such vehicle in the Eighties and Nineties, claimed the equipment was rarely switched on.
He said: ‘There were aerials on the roof, connected to nothing. We called it flag-waving: driving around to show people we were about.’
Other recent correspondents to newspapers have suggested many vans carried no equipment at all.
Since 2002, when the Royal Mail stopped running vans, analogue TVs have been replaced by digital ones, so old detection equipment would be obsolete.
Meanwhile, hostility to the licence fee has grown in tandem with the explosion in Freeview and satellite channels, which means people spend less time watching the BBC.
In a bid to persuade them to pay up, the Corporation claims today’s enforcement officers have hand-held detectors that can pinpoint TVs ‘within 20 seconds’.
But they refuse to explain how these devices work or how many are in use.
The number of detection vans is also a secret. However, a 2009 procurement document seen by the Mail states the BBC was at this time seeking to ‘enhance the current fleet of vans by building a further fleet of vans (minimum five)’.
That suggests there could be as few as ten in operation — one for every 2.5 million households.
Interestingly, the BBC has since given evidence to the Information Commissioner arguing (successfully) that it should not be required to disclose details of the fleet under the Freedom of Information Act.
Its submission, which has again been seen by this newspaper, argues that making such information public would ‘change the public’s perception of the effectiveness of detector vans’.
It further warns: ‘If the deterrent effect of television detector vans is lost . . . a significant number of people would decide not to pay their licence fee.’
In other words, if the truth about these sinister vehicles which supposedly haunt our cul-de-sacs — not to mention the men in moustaches who operate them — ever gets out, then the BBC reckons we’ll stop being scared of them.
