Intransigent licensing attitudes

MANY boaters have experienced the problem of the heavy-handed demands from the television licensing people, first outlined by Maffi, with now a report from Andrea Cordani who had constant demands for a licence to cover her boat, though she did not have one!

I have read the latest stories about the television licensing with interest. I too, ran foul of their intransigent attitudes, Andrea writes. Before buying my latest narrowboat, and knowing that moorings were difficult to come by in the London area where I was employed, I took great care to first obtain (and pay for) a fully residential mooring run by British Waterways in a newly opened basin in west London.

Mooring but no boat

It was over six months before I found a boat to suit me, so for that period of time I had a mooring, but no boat! From the start of the mooring lease, I also paid local council tax, which those particular moorings were subject to, and I also had a mailbox.

From the first week of me signing up as the owner of the address, the letters from TV Licensing started to arrive, getting redder in print and more threatening in tone as the weeks rolled by. I phoned on several occasions to say that I only had a strip of water next to a pontoon, and therefore no television receiver, since I didn't yet have a boat on the water at all. Could they please explain to me how I was supposed to be able to receive television on it?

Harassment

It fell on deaf ears and they said they would send the investigation team, complete with detector van! I demanded to speak to a senior person to complain (I had a television licence anyway, registered to the flat I was currently living in) and finally the letters stopped after I threatened to report them to the police for harassment.

It seems they have not only a very inflexible system, but an inbuilt heavy-handed 'rottweiler' attitude which I have not experienced from any other statutory agency.