back to article Capita signs £560m deal with BBC

The Beeb has signed a £560m eight-year deal with Capita to manage TV licences, deploying tech and analytics in a bid to cut costs and boost revenues. The renewal of the previous gig £500m gig signed in 2002 comes as Auntie faces pressure from government austerity measures, with the licence fee frozen until 2015 – which …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Crapita remain

    So, another 8 years of threatening computer generated junk mail from my friends at Capita. But on the bright side, Michelle Tunstall and Paul Willarse get to keep their jobs. Good on them.

    Was kind of looking forward to new letters from a new set of parasites. I'm pretty upset I've been 'under investigation' for 5 years but they refuse to tell me the results of these 'investigations' or take me to court.

  2. aBloke FromEarth
    Unhappy

    Goodbye Auntie

    It was lovely knowing you.

  3. SJRulez
    Thumb Down

    Not a good deal at all

    BBC CFO Zarin Patel claimed the deal "represents great value" for the licence-fee paying public.

    No its not, it still a rubbish deal.... I don't want to pay for the BBC at all since I don't watch their channels.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    Our records show.....

    Them: "Our records show that on the 1st of November you purchased equipment capable of receiving TV transmissions."

    Me: It's a DVD recorder and we're a video production company who use them to do quick dubs of footage. We have no aerial it will never be plugged into a TV.

    [One month later]

    Them: " Our records show that on the 1st of November you purchased......."

    And so it goes on, every bloody time we purchase any equipment with a receiver in it. It is perfectly possible to require a TV or DVD recorder without actually using it for receiving purposes. We should only need to tell them the once that in our line of business we use such equipment for our own work purposes but yet they waste money sending letters out.

    The last letter we had said they are coming around to check. Good luck to them if they do, they're wasting their own money and not mine.

    It's pretty easy to check out we're a legit production company but how much do each of these letters cost to print and send, let alone their proposed site visit?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      I have a wardrobe full of equipment capable of receiving TV transmissions. They currently have various shirts hanging on them.

      If Capita want to reduce costs they can stop sending me letters suggesting I'm a scumbag and inviting me to complete the impossible task of proving I'm not doing something.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Simple, buy from a shop and then give them any old postcode.

      1. dotdavid
        Thumb Up

        Any old postcode...

        "Simple, buy from a shop and then give them any old postcode."

        That's quite a good idea, although I'd suggest registering their address details so they can send themselves spam would be a better one.

        Any of the following addresses from the TV Licencing "complaint" page (they don't seem to have an address on their contact us page) should do;

        BBC TV Licensing

        Room 4436

        BBC White City

        201 Wood Lane

        London

        W12 7TS

        TV Licensing

        Bristol

        BS98 1TL

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      You still need a licence.

      The DVD recorder has the capability of receiving TV signals as it has a tuner circuit. Not having it plugged into an aerial has never been accepted as a valid reason for not having a licence as far as I am aware.

      Since the late-80's it has been a requirement by law for retailers to inform licencing of a purchasers address for any equipment capable of receiving TV signals, unless it is purely battery powered. Not all retailers remember to do it and sometimes the luddite sales assistants insist it on DVD players...

      Anyway that's the source of the spam - the purchase gets past to Crappita and they email a licence reminder.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Stand by for the cull!!

    And the jobs that are left will be target for off-shoring. Don't trust Capita!!

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    hmmm

    Seems unlikely to "increase TV licensing revenues collected", unless the current collector is a bit crap, oh I see this is a renewal, so perhaps they will.

  7. g e
    Meh

    "represents great value" for the licence-fee paying public

    No.

    That'll be a license fee frozen for till 2015, that will.

  8. s. pam Silver badge
    FAIL

    Fucking rubbish -- BREAKUP the Beeb and privatise it!

    Crapita, cost savings and efficiency.

    Pick the odd word in the above.

    That's right, it is the "and".

    GIven all the negative press, cost overruns, and coverage in Private Eye, I know (a) we'll be paying a fuck load more TV License fees, (b) it won't fucking work, and (c) they'll be sacked 1/2 the way through the contact and a.n.other crap contractor will be brought in under similar banners and trumpets.

    1. M Gale

      I wouldn't say "privatise"...

      ...but having the thing publically owned and run by a private company to a mandate that enforces what types of programming can be shown - you know, like they have now - could be a lovely compromise that gets rid of the TV license and lets the traditionalists keep the channels they know and love. I've suggested going to a Freemium-type model for a while now, where the flagship BBC1 and maybe BBC2 are kept as-is, but the rest of the channels either go behind a paywall or (shock, horror) get advert breaks. The BBC has so much in their archives that could be online and available on-demand to anybody able to buy a household BBC license (as opposed to TV license) and tap their login details into a web page.

      Again, the types of programming can be mandated. A regular review of the Beeb's performance against said mandate would stop whatever slide downmarket that the license-lovers seem to fear so much.

      Chances of that happening though? Approximately zilch. Too many people who gasp so hard they cause the room they are in to implode any time you suggest getting rid of that bloody tax.

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Thanks to the current Director General's suicidal negotiation skills, the BBC won't have 16% of cuts, but 20%. :-( And if another of his gang of cronies (Patel, in this case) says Auntie is getting a good deal, then going on past experience, it looks like another financial windfall for Capita, and another big hit for the BBC.

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Judging by the comments, it's seems I'm not alone when it comes to receiving threatening letters from Crapita (in the form of TV license demands). I have a TV, but it has no built in receiver. I have no separate receiver since the only thing I use the TV for is watching films via an Apple TV (not a fanboi, it's the first model that I got gratis from my brother when he upgraded). I acquired the TV from a friend, so I've never bought equipment with a receiver in it from a shop. So how come I get a letter from the TV licensing people every couple of months threatening to take me to court? And this despite polite written replies to point out I don't have a TV receiver ...

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      You are not alone

      I've been hounded for years. I've had the knocks at the door demanding entry. I tell then to get a warrant and if they believe I'm a criminal, take me to court. It never happens but the letter barage continues. I will NEVER pay for a licence as I don't believe in the BBC model of it doing whatever it wants and me paying to be shafted. The last thing was the F1 deal where the BBC jumped into bed with SKY whilst depriving the fee payers from watching F1. All to save money whilst they piss it up the wall in the move up north and of course, next year they are spending millions on an X-Factor clone.

      Any premises without a TV license will get a letter. It's the new detector van. Everyone is guilty until they admit their guilt. And before anyone asks I don't watch live TV.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Polite letters do not work...

        Aggressive , bad tempered letters, however, do get results and groveling apologies.

        Any repeat offenses should be marked up in red ink and returned in the provided envelope with a note stating that the recipient will pay postage.

        This works VERY well for me.

    2. jonathanb Silver badge

      They send you threatograms because your address is on the postcode database. They work on the assumption that everyone who doesn't watch TV is a liar.

      1. Peter Gathercole Silver badge

        @jonathanb

        No, not everybody, but a significant number.

        I know that this is a question that cannot easily be answered, but I wonder how many addresses on the post-code database actually do not watch broadcast television?

        Certainly those that are empty, but I would guess (and this is a finger in the air guess with no research) that television watching probably has about a 98% penetration of all addresses (this would allow for ~600,000 residential addresses to not watch TV, which is, I think, probably an over-estimate)

        If you follow the odds and apply these figures, then the odds are that a good number of the people who do not buy a licence should. Wikipedia states that 27% of all visits in 2007-8 found that a licence should have been purchased. It's difficult to quantify how accurately the visits are targeted, but that is a significant amount of lost revenue, and a large number of people (possibly up to a million if there were 3.5 million visits, although this number probably includes multiple visits to the same address) who ARE prepared to LIE and break the law.

        So the numbers probably justify some of these accusations, even if it is unpleasant. If you are one of the real people who do not watch broadcast TV, put at least some of the blame on those people who do cheat.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Because they spam!

      They just write to every address that's ever had a TV licence demanding money. They don't seem capable of believing that an increasing number of people neither have nor want a TV.

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Fantasy TV detector vans don't come cheap, you know. The magic pixie dust they are made of costs a bomb these days.

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Capita manage the service only

    they haven't written a single line of code, thats down to a third party who handle both the TVL and iQor websites currently.

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    YouTube

    Just do so a serach on YouTube for TV License, some truly funny videos await you.

    www.youtube.com/results?search_query=tv+license

  14. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    What a waste of money. All they have to do is enforce the death penalty for any adult unable to produce one.

  15. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Awful lot of AC's posting on this. Wonder why.

    1. gerryg
      Mushroom

      Can you see the real me (can you?)

      I don't watch TV.

      I don't watch iPlayer catch-up TV because (a) (slightly sanctimoniously) I don't understand why it doesn't need a TV licence, (b) I gave up watching TV

      For many years I thought "fuck you" with all the letter demanding that I engage TVLA, then in 2009 I decided to persuade then to stop, concluding with a letter sent by recorded delivery, They stopped.

      Next I got letter addressed to someone else which I thought could give rise to actual problems, identity theft and whatnot (precis - the joys of the DPA and TVLA)

      After that for some reason the Post Office decided to modify my PAF entry (did I mention "fuck you"?) which seriously irked me from an identity protection perspective

      (short digression: while they could change my entry arbitrarily, as part of the argument losing process, they invented a need to involve my local authority to revert it. To my complete and utter astonishment, this was not a three year, we've lost your notes, process but a by return "sort it" email to the Post Office)

      Of course both PAF changes triggered TVLA moronautomatons and now I just collect the letters in a folder (did I mention "fuck you"?)

      For the record R4, R3, WS and very occasionally R6 are my friends and I would be happy to buy a radio licence.

  16. Oldfogey
    Black Helicopters

    After a certain amount of hassle when I first moved to this address, I wrote a firm, though polite, letter to them pointing out that I do not watch TV, do not have a TV aerial, and do not have any other equipment used for receiving broadcast proposals.

    I asked for an aknowledgment of my letter, and received one.

    I now hear from them every few years politley asking if my circumstances have changed. If they save sent a paid postage envelope, I inform them that I still do not watch broadcast TV. If no envelope, their letter goes in the bin.

    If they get stroppier, then so can I.

    For the avoidance of doubt, you DO NOT need a licence merely to own equipment, only to use it to receive broadcast programmes, whether to watch or record.

    And they do not have the right to enter your house without a warrant.

  17. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Don't care

    TVL can go fuck themselves. Bunch of jumped up salesmen (That's what they advertise for when they recruit anyone). TV detector vans are a myth. Any you find are empty and only used for scare tactics (park outside an estate or shopping center). It would be too expensive to run. It's all done on a postcode database and sometimes some CAPITA rep trying to peak through your living room window. They are not allowed into your home without a warrant and even then the police are only there to keep the peace. You can tell the police you will only allow them entry and the rep must leave.

    You don't need a TV license if you are not watching 'live, as it is being broadcast'.

    You can stream iPlayer and TV Catchup although there are plans to try update the law on this so that is covered by the TVL (search this site for that tidbit).

    As for the letters. I use them to wipe my arse with.

  18. Peter Gathercole Silver badge

    Stop whinging

    Anybody who really chooses not to have any TV receiving equipment can skip over the rest of this post, because I agree that there should be a real opt out from the abusive mail for people who do not watch any broadcast TV.

    Now. For everybody who just disagrees with the licence fee - move to another country.

    It may be outdated. It may be the wrong model to pay for public broadcast TV. It may be inequitable for people who don't watch BBC content, but it IS the law for owning TV receiving equipment.

    It is as much a legal requirement to have a TV licence if you own and operate a TV in the UK as it is to tax a car if you keep it on the road. If you think it is wrong, lobby your MP to have the law changed.

    I don't watch as much broadcast BBC as I used to, but I don't begrudge paying the money. It's a hell of a lot less than I pay Sky, and there is so much more real content generated by the BBC than Sky (buying content is not the same as making it or commissioning it).

    The BBC generate content that appears on a lot more than the 8 main BBC channels (1, 2, 3, 4, CBBC, CBeebies, BBC Alba and BBC News 24).

    I challenge anybody to flip through Sky or Virgin without finding some BBC generated content on the non-BBC channels. And a significant amount of the licence fee actually makes the terrestrial broadcasting system affordable to the other users such as ITV. Remember when OnDigital and ITV Digital effectively went bust because they could not generate the required revenue.

    Actually thinking about it, maybe there should be an equivalent of SORN for non-TV owners. Make it an annual declaration, make it a criminal offence to make an incorrect statement, but make it enough to stop the mails. Ask people who buy TV receiving equipment for non-TV receiving purposes to renew their declaration. Back this up with an an investigation arm that can get warrants for entry, but put heavy penalties paid to the innocent party from the investigation arm if the entry does not find any infringement, and the penalties should come from the profits of the company operating the investigation, not from the fees charged to the BBC to run the collections.

    I'm sure that this will not satisfy everybody, as no doubt there will be libertarians who see this as unnecessary in an ideal world, but hey, breaking news, this is not an ideal world, it contains liars and cheats.

    1. Dr. Mouse

      Minor correction...

      "It is as much a legal requirement to have a TV licence if you own and operate a TV in the UK as it is to tax a car if you keep it on the road."

      It is not a requirement to have a license if you own and operate a TV in the UK. It is a requirement to have a TV license if you receive broadcast TV content. It is perfectly legal to own equipment capable of receiving TV broadcasts without a TV license IF you don't recieve them (e.g. have no aerial connected, detune the TV etc.), no matter what they try to tell you. The license ppl can get quite threatenning. I have a friend who did this. They needed to save money, so cancelled the TVL, detuned the TVs, diconnected the aerials, and stopped watching TV (watched DVDs etc when they wanted to). The TVL sent someone round, she invited them in and showed them that she could not get broadcast TV in the house. Initially they claimed "you could just plug back up and retune the equipment", but this doesn't hold water. They went away with tails between legs, and a year or so later, when my friend had the money to do so, the license started being paid again.

      1. Peter Gathercole Silver badge

        I was talking about

        operating the TV as a receiver. I admit I was a bit lax in my language, but if you read my post, I do say about receiving broadcast TV (which includes simulcasts over the Internet). I was assuming that people would read the whole comment.

        The whole concept of what can receive TV is a moot one. Some time back, I bought for cash a TV signal amplifier from Tesco. I used the household Tesco Club card, which silently provided the address information required which prevented the checkout assistant from asking me to provide identity information (normally, they take it from the payment card).

        Unfortunately, the card is in my wife's name, not mine, but the TV licence is in my name. We do not have anything stupid like different surnames, so the surname match.

        A few months later, my wife gets a letter from the TV licensing authority, accusing her of not having a TV licence. I immediately checked, and found that the licence was still valid, and I checked with her, and yes, we were still married, and we were both still living at the same address for which the licence was issued.

        This begs two questions. Firstly, do they not accept surname and address as proof of living in the same household, and secondly, a TV amplifier is not strictly speaking receiving equipment for broadcast TV. I know that it will be used with a TV most of the time, but it is not proof that a TV is being operated. Being a bit of a an electronics fix-all, I may have just been wanting it for spare parts, or I could have been using it to boost and distribute a signal from a DVD or Video player around the house.

        I actually bought it for my parents house, because their booster had just failed.

        I sent the licensing authority an email, quoting the TV licence number, and never heard anything back again, not even an apology.

        On another occasion, Tesco actually would not allow me to buy a £220 TV for cash unless I provided some ID. I'm not sure whether that is legal, although I understand that a shop has the right to not serve anybody if they so wish.

        As another slightly humorous incident, a shop actually asked me to fill in an identity form when I purchased for cash a cheap DVD player (no TV receiver in it). Just shows how poorly the message is understood.

    2. Mark 5
      Unhappy

      No it's not the law for owning TV receiving equipment.

      From the TV licensing website itself:

      http://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/about/legislation-and-policy-AB9/#link1

      "Part 4 of the Communications Act 2003 makes it an offence to install or use a television receiver to watch or record any television programmes as they're being shown on television without a valid TV Licence. "

      When I moved in, I wrote to the TV Licencing Agency outlining my situation (have a TV but it's never been tuned, I don't have the relevant cables in my home), I asked them to confirm it was legal which they did. Additionally I invited them to visit and gave directions (my property is hard to find), I wanted to be fully above board.

      A couple of years later I was "Under Investigation", it actually nudged me into getting a licence, I thought I'd give television a go. I never actually got around to wiring up and tuning the TV though. A few months after getting the licence I had one of their, for want of a better word, thugs turn up. He told me I don't have a licence, and I'll be taken to court and be fined if I didn't buy one from him on the spot. I have to admit I did play him a little, I knew exactly where it was but took a while to find it, with him hurrying me up and saying I can't get away with stalling him. Then as he'd almost filled in his paperwork I produced. He was rather annoyed to say the least.

      The next day I cancelled my licence, withdraw implied consent for access to my property. They now need a warrant to come visit.

      I believe in the BBC, I don't believe in the bullies they've hired.

      1. Peter Gathercole Silver badge

        @Mark 5

        See my previous correction about my lax language, and I think that if you had actually read the whole of the post, you would have seen that I do/did know that it is the operating of the receiving equipment to receive broadcast television that is what is covered by the law.

        But a computer with a link to the Internet is also classed as receiving equipment.....

        I sympathise with your treatment, it sounds a bit harsh. As I have suggested before, you can't catch the real cheats without also looking at the people who really don't watch TV. I appreciate that they could just take your word, but if that is all it took to avoid investigation (and that really means that someone is evaluating whether you should be purchasing a licence), then the people who say to themselves that they aren't going to buy a licence would have no difficulty lying.

    3. gerryg
      Megaphone

      leaving aside all the other reasons I disagree with you

      This is not remotely up there with grief such as Simon Singh putting his life on hold for half a decade and mortgaging his house in order to deal with the process of justice. The clue is in the five years. They are gone forever along with the stress etc. (Never mind real grief such as the woman that was killed by a bonkers ex-boyfriend despite 51 calls to the police).

      However flipping the "broken window" approach to civic society on its head and applying it to those that claim to make our lives better, if I could in anyway be convinced that the bureaucratic machinations, incompetence and indifference had any consequences for the perpetrators of such, then your scheme might have a slim chance of being taken seriously.

      In my world, nothing makes me want to get up quicker in order to kick my radio around the room than when I hear of the appalling consequences of yet another sequence of bureaucratic cock-ups together with some spokesdroid or other talking about "lessons having been learned" and "agencies working closer together in future"

  19. Fading

    Refunds?

    So given as a lot of TV receiving equipment will become non-receiving equipment as of the 4th of April (or has already) where do I get a refund from?

  20. Ken Hagan Gold badge

    HOW MUCH ?!?!?!

    So financing the BBC by the licence fee costs half a billion, whereas financing through a modest increase in income tax would have a marginal cost of zero (since we're collecting income tax anyway).

    OK, so it would be slightly different people actually paying the bill. I keep hearing about these people who don't have a telly. Presumably they're not averse to checking news.bbc.co.uk every so often, mind. There are also a few people who don't pay income tax, usually for the excellent reason that they are broke, but occasionally because they've spent half a billion on accountants.

    No matter, the vast majority of the population would pay either way and it would (on this evidence) save HALF A BILLION QUID of administrative costs, at a time when the country is supposedly broke and facing imminent economic destruction courtesy of the eurozone.

    Fortunately, we have a government that is constantly searching for ways to cut costs and boost efficiency in public services. (Ho ho!) So how long will it be before they wake up to this horrendous waste and pull the plug on Crapita's gravy train? What's that you say? "Never, because they're a bunch of clueless numbskulls?" Well, here's a really simple test for them. Let's see how they get on...

    1. M Gale

      checking news.bbc.co.uk

      If you throw all of your content out for free and then expect people to pay for it post-fact, you are a fool.

      The BBC should put their entire site behind a paywall if they want consistency. Make it so when you buy a TV license, you can have a login name and password for everyone in your house. As above, I've suggested a compromise that would continue to pay for the BBC and yet allow people who don't want, or even like the BBC to do without it.

      But like I've already said, every time someone suggests a tax-free BBC, the sound of air sucking through teeth threatens to deafen. Bloody morons.

  21. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Web sites

    Why do you not need to have a TV licence to use all the BBC websites? surely they are funded using licence payers money and so everyone not having a licence and using the sites if freeloading?

    There's no advertising on the sites, so it's not funded that way.

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