Why the F should I tell BBC every year that I don’t watch TV ?

So all of you parents/grandparents hand on heart never watch CBeebies or CBBC? It would be the most terrible disaster if funding was pulled from the BBC and there was no more serious investment in children's educational tv.
BBC children's output is the best in the world. I am shocked that a lot of posters would happily throw this programming away.
I just don't believe that all the posters with young children never ever watch CBeebies in some form or another. Your children will almost certainly watch these programmes at school.
It's a bit like refusing to pay for education because you no longer attend school.
i am always in awe when Number Blocks and Alpha Blocks is on in our house and how simple it makes maths and English. However, it is like so many things. In the end the children will suffer. it makes me despair for the future.

This.

I imagine a lot of people do watch them who don’t pay.

I've moved into a new property and started getting letters through, I was doing the declaration to say I didn't need one and it said they may arrange a visit anyway just to check.

I thought nah stuff that, either take my declaration as fact or don't ask me. Just throw the letters in the bin now, I live in a second floor flat so good luck getting to my door

I've never told them I don't need a licence as it's not a legal requirement to inform them (I dont have a tv anymore and wouldn't watch any BBC shows even if I did).

After a while any of their scary letters will revert to being addressed to "the occupier" or "legal resident" and you can just recycle these spam letters which are sent out as standard to any address they think needs a licence - don't take it personally. You are not obliged to open the door to Capita, they have no legal power to force entry (they're not the police) and you have no obligation to inform the BBC that you don't need a licence, anymore that you need to tell your local council that you don't own a pet.

I like the BBC from time to time but not using it much. I do watch the odd church service on Facebook or streaming online (free). Do I need a license for that?

Complete arseholes😒 imagine if she'd have been there and the kind of worry those kinds of letter can cause. Twats. Love your username by the way😂

That's a relief. 😄

Cancelled Mine at Christmas and it expired June . Officer called last week. It’s absolute harassment

There were lots of letters to my mum’s house after she died, despite telling them online. We could have done without it, in amongst everything else.
Hassling bereaved relatives is pretty low.

Yes it is. Otherwise you start getting bombarded with letters and threats to turn up to check you aren’t watching a television.

Had exactly the same with Mums house. She'd gone in a care home, licence letter came in post, I said property empty.

Got warning letter three times that an inspector could call round. Bring it on, tv switched off from the plug. Nightmare. Wouldn't have minded but she had a free licence anyway!

I was relentlessly harassed by them when I cancelled mine. I had agents at the door almost daily, one at 9 pm at night telling me he’d been sitting outside while picking up “signals” from my TV. He had not been picking up signals because the sodding thing wasn’t even plugged in. He demanded to come in and inspect my “set up” and I told him where to go. It became such an issue that I renewed it in the end. I do watch the TV now, only one or two programmes so I have to have one but the hassle they gave me was shocking.

I was joking …

My DF seemed to manage quite well without a TV, internet or phone.

We pay ours but we do watch live TV and to a lesser extent BBC. I agree the tactics on these are awful though-I do wonder how effective they are in "scaring" people into paying.

Surely there must be a more effective way to identify people who genuinely don't need to pay with digital technology being as it is, than sending out letters.

This made me laugh! (Trying to imagine moving a tv into her home & the reaction.)

But seriously I think this idea that tv (BBC or otherwise) is something you necessarily ‘enjoy’ in old age, or that it addresses isolation in the very elderly, is symptomatic of a real wider social malaise that downplays reading and thought and real human contact compared to figures on a screen.

Despite being so old, my relative continues to have good social contacts- I am amazed actually by the number of visitors she has each week. People are so kind! The idea that she has anything to gain in social terms by looking at a screen, at images of people she will never meet, who will never speak to her or care for her or make a joke to her or bring her a slice of cake, is a sad one.

And Capita won’t be getting one.

You don’t ‘have’ to really. I never have because it is none of their business whatsoever and I refuse to engage with them and I never will. I just get a letter every month addressed to Legal Occupier which goes straight in the bin. I don’t care how many letters they send me they are completely without any powers at all. I suppose it keeps the Royal Mail occupied.

I suspect if fewer and fewer people have a licence they'll end up doing what they've done in Austria and Germany and making it so every household has to pay a monthly fee for TV and radio even if you don't have a TV and never watch it. Because, they said, we could watch the streaming on the internet and say we didn't have a TV and not pay. So fucking put the streaming content behind some kind of pay wall then with a log in connected to your licence number.

But no, since this came in a couple of years ago I have to pay fucking €15 a fucking month for content I don't watch and is a load of shite anyway.

And that was because more and more people weren't watching the shite, didn't have a TV and were watching Netflix instead of ORF.

When I cleared out my estranged late father's flat, I found lots of TV licence letters, he hadn't kept them specially there was loads of other unneeded post as well, he didn't have a smartphone, internet or a TV, he was in his 80s.

When DH and I first moved in together over twenty years ago I made a mistake giving our address to the tv licence people which resulted in them having three flats on their system in one house when I reality there were only two. The very first letter they sent about the lack of tv licence for the non existent third flat threatened bailiffs, no exaggeration.

52 is elderly? 🤣

They need a search warrant to enter your home so only need to let them in if they have got one.

You don't at all. They send captia sales people, it's not a legal requirement to make a declaration.
Stop scaremongering