12,000 TV licence evaders prosecuted

THE latest crackdown on TV licence evaders resulted in almost 12,000 people being prosecuted for the offence last year, An Post confirmed yesterday.

The get tough TV advertising campaign launched jointly by RTÉ and An Post in the past three years has resulted in 4,210 more TV licence evaders being caught and prosecuted in the courts.

Among the new measures introduced to catch more licence evaders were incentive payments to An Post for good performance and penalties if targets are not met.

“We are working closely with RTÉ to ensure that more and more evaders will be caught and we now have sufficient TV licence inspectors,” An Post’s spokesperson said.

Other measures that lead to more TV licences being paid in the past three years were the introduction of an instalment payments system by direct debit and a new call centre that allows the licence to be paid by credit card or laser card.

The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) published a value for money report on the television licence fee collection before the weekend which revealed that the rate of evasion has dropped dramatically in the past seven years. The report showed that the rate of evasion dropped from 16% in 1998 to 12% in 2002. And this rate dropped even further to 11.5% last year.

“This reduction is very good considering there was an increase of between 50,000 and 60,000 new houses being built annually during that period,” An Post’s spokesperson said.

But An Post has been criticised for its aggressive targeting of new housing estates where they call to new home owners within weeks of people moving in to ensure they have a TV licence.

The PAC report also revealed that in 2003 An Post was paid a fee of €10.5 million for collecting the licence fee for RTÉ.

But PAC Committee chairman Deputy Michael Noonan said An Post found that its costs for collecting the TV licence fee were in fact e11m in that same year and this was not commercially viable.

An Post threatened to pull out of the contract with RTÉ at the time because the detection and prosecution of TV licence evaders which was not a core part of their business, created a great deal of negative publicity and damaged the An Post brand.

Although there was much uncertainty about An Post continuing as the collector of the TV licence fee last year, the contract was eventually renewed with RTÉ.