Paying £31 a month for TV licence

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Just realised we have a direct debit of £31 a month for tv license? Why is this the case if it's £41 every three months?

Have you only recently set it up? If not thats loooads extra.

How long have you been paying that amount?

@dementedpixie

How long have you been paying that amount?

3 months

Are you like back paying for some months?

Have you only recently started paying for one? You normally pay for the first one over 6 months and then pay for the next one over 12 months

You pay the first one over 6 months, then you pay 6 months in advance and 6 months in arrears so it will go down after 6 months

We've paid ours by DD for years, so way beyond the initial front-loading stage - but that still sounds over £4 a month more than I'd expect for the initial 6 months, as ours is £13.25 or so a month, so wouldn't that be less than £27-ish per month if split over 6 months??

Only thing I can think is that, afaia, TV licences run for complete months (like road tax/VED), so might the extra £4 be for the extra part of the first (incomplete) month, depending on when you took it out? Thus, £4.50 for, say, 20-28 February and £26.50 for all of March (all taken in one payment); 5 payments of £26.50 in April-August; then £13.25 for every month after that?

I'm not sure they would charge pro-rata for part-months, though - I wouldn't put it past them to say that you have to pay for the full month, even if you only use one day of it.

www.tvlicensing.co.uk/pay-for-your-tv-licence/ways-to-pay/direct-debit

A TV licence is one of the few things you cannot 'pay as you go' so the direct debit makes sure you have paid in advance, after a year it will drop to £13 something.

I'm old enough to remember when you had to pay the full amount up front in one.

If you already had a licence before setting up the DD then you can ask for a refund.

If you have Sky and, or Prime and or Netflix just cancel it. Chances are you never watch live TV anyway.

If you have 'traditional' Sky that you watch through a TV set, you still need a licence. Sky itself is just the platform, with channels sourced from various places - the ones owned/provided directly by Sky are obviously included, and the free-to-air channels should be by-the-by; but the 'terrestrial' channels they also transmit through their platform do require a licence.

In fact, I'm not sure quite how it works and how the law has caught up with new technology options, but I think that, even if you had a way of blocking all non-Sky channels through your Sky box, you might still find that owning and using a traditional TV set to watch telly technically requires a licence.

I'm one of those very rare people who thinks that, in spite of its many, many faults, the BBC is well worth the licence fee for what we get from it - but it's anachronistic nowadays - and grossly unfair - to charge people to watch any TV and give the money to the BBC.

I don't know what the plans are for when the licence fee ends, but a subscription model for those who want to receive BBC services would be much fairer - and we would certainly subscribe. I just don't know how they will restrict it to subscribers only, as the whole BBC infrastructure is currently based on everybody having free access, because everybody has already been made to pay up.