UK TV License Resistance

Using a TV without a license is classified as a minor criminal offence. It is triable in the first instance in Magistrates courts. Upon a guilty verdict for a first offence you are liable to prosecution legal costs and to a fine of up to £1,000. If you are extremely poor, as defined in the Introduction, and if it is your first offence, then you will likely be made to pay £200 fine and £200 costs at £4 per week. If you default on the payments then you can be jailed for 7 days per outstanding £200 or part thereof, for instance for £201 outstanding you would be sentenced to 14 days jail. Your instalments pay off the costs element first. As soon as legal proceedings are over Capita will come after you all over again for the next year's license if you still haven't got one. So you just sit there and spin out the legal proceedings. This is because the bastards cannot intimidate a party to legal proceedings, so they will have to stay away from your door. So if you are a committed resister, as I am, you will just keep filing appeal after appeal and dragging out every procedural nuance. It is perfectly legal, and it is moral, and it is self-preservation. With so many things going for it how can you resist! Anyways, for repeat convictions I believe you can be jailed without further ado and banned from having a TV in the home. These people have no pity, they DO take prisoners, so you will just have to drag things out whether you are innocent or guilty. If everyone did the enforcement mechanism would collapse. Although I have been convicted once, I have not had a license for 3 years. My TV broke down, I got rid of it, my lawyer wrote them a letter saying so at £500 cost to the public through Legal Aide which dwarfs the £124 they were after when they thought proceedings had finished. They want into my house, so screw them and torment them, if they won't believe I don't have a TV any more then I will just keep teasing them into the future. Ha ha!

Magistrates Court trials are what is known as 'summary'. This means that once you are in front of the Magistrates you can be charged and made to answer there and then all in one fell swoop. In practice, they have to get you before the court in the first place, and the court has to have jurisdiction to try you. Both are achieved by the issuance to you of a court document called a summonse. If you ignore the summonse the trial might still go ahead without you. However, the summonse itself is a legal document and there are laws governing its production and service upon you. I have found that the naughty boys in Capita and Magistrates courts collude to simply forge summonses so as to keep down costs, and that gives you a chance to throw out proceedings before they can get started by challenging the legality of the summonse and hence the jurisdiction of the court to try you. You need first to know what the correct procedure for issueing a summonse is, then we will look at what they are actually doing. You will present these two matters to the court immediately that you get the summonse, by way of writing back to the court your objection, saying you intend at a hearing to challenge the validity of the summonse and hence of the court's jurisdiction. You must always keep a record of what you have sent and of what is sent to you, use a lever arch file or computer system and be ready to reproduce the whole of that record at each hearing in each court.

Court proceedings are of two types - judicial and administrative. Some acts of a court can be done by staff who are just court administrators, those are administrative proceedings. Other acts of a court can only be done by a judge, those are judicial proceedings. A summonse can only be produced as a result of judicial proceedings in the relevant Magistrates Court. In such a court, a 'judge' is either a Justice or a Clerk to the Justices. A Justice can be a layman appointed part time, typically 26 half days a year with no pay, or a full time solicitor called a stipendiary magistrate who gets paid a salary and who is often also referred to as a District Judge. A Clerk to the Justices will often be a barrister, and he advises the other justices. So those are the guys who can issue a summonse. But to issue a summonse the justice must have an 'information' 'laid' before him by the would be prosecutor. This is where the prosecutor in secret puts to the justice a charge and evidence to support it to show you have a case to answer. It is discretionary on the justice whether he then issues the summonse, but he must at least check that there is such a charge known to the law and that the evidence presented points to a breach of that law and that the would be prosecutor is entitled to prosecute that type of breach and that it is a type suitable for summary proceedings by Magistrates. If the justice decides to issue the summonse, administrative staff may draw the actual document up for him, and his signature may be attached to that document by way of a seal rather than by handwriting. Unless this process is followed by prosecutor and justice alike, the summonse will not be valid and the court will not have jurisdiction. A procedural irregularity in the summonse can be rectified by going through the process again, but a valid summonse must be issued within the 6 month time limit. So from the time the investigator knocks on your door to the time you receive a valid summonse must not exceed 6 months.

See these summonse related documents sent to me. Remember to enlarge the scans so you can read them by putting mouse over image and hitting enlarge button when it appears in bottom right corner of image.

In addition to the evidence in the scans I had the chance to cross-examine Paula Greening at Crown Court. She is nothing special, just a clerk, who barely understands English. Further, I am a professional computer systems analyst/designer/programmer and I know what I am looking at when I am looking at those documents that have been scanned - particularly the summonse itself. So all this evidence gathered, I am going to tell what they are actually doing.

When the 6 months are almost up and their computer shows you still have not bought a license a simple clerk pushes a button on a Capita computer and thereafter everything is on autopilot, no real people involved. Most Magistrates courts allow Capita's computer to directly print a summonse, nothing sent at all to the court except presumeably a copy. But some, like Wirral Magistrates Court, insist on printing their own forgeries. For that case, the Capita computer sends your personal information to a Magistrates computer which is not in the court but which is in a regional computer center, and that second computer sucks in pre-printed stationery and puts onto it your details and spits it out. The summonse in this case is then mailed to Capita, where the company adds a witness statement from the investigator and mails the bundle to you. Looking more closely at that stationery. Such stationery is made by an external printer, with the Clerk to the Justices's signature applied to all forms. In the court data center the only human involvement will be in loading the pre-printed stationery onto the computer printer and then mailing out the finished forms to Capita. It is straightforward forgery, with the courts complicit, but it means that 200,000 prosecutions a year are utterly unlawful and that the Magistrates trying you and everyone else in that court house of any standing knows the proceedings are illegal. They just hope you do not find out. Now you know, so challenge the court's jurisdiction at the outset.

Obviously, Magistrates courts don't want to put in the effort of reading 200,000 informations per year just for something like a £124 TV License fee, so they collude with the prosecutor to silently cut out the judicial process of hearing an information and authorising a summonse. Now when you see those people you know that they are bastards and liars, and that there is despotism from the Bench, and that the Bench and the prosecutor are as one. Do you think you'll get a fair trial? To be fair, a lay magistrate may not know this any more than you so try this line on with him, but everyone else working in the courthouse on a paid basis knows it.

A further revelation is that TV Licensing prosecutes in batches of 50 persons at a time, and they send a manager and a solicitor to court to talk to those of the 50 people who turn up to get them to roll over and accept their guilt straight away. Don't listen to them though, they are talking to you to get you to put yourself in their hands, and that will make you their 'bitch' so to speak. Anyway, one resister like me per batch of 50 completely ruins the economics of the excercise. The BBC is not paying for the prosecutions, Capita is, and it desperately needs you to roll over, otherwise commission on license sales just gets wiped out by prosecution costs, and then Capita is pissed off because it may make a loss rather than a profit. It is such a slender balance that later at Crown Court they told the judge that they had spent £5,000 prosecuting me and that that was 1/3rd of their annual budget for such. I don't know if thats national or regional budget. But you get the idea that just a few determined resisters per region can crucify Capita - so long as they are very poor. So go to it!

A word of caution. Parliament is thinking of making it legal for TV Licensing to issue its own summonses.

There is a second way to mount a challenge. This time to the prosecutor's participation. Only the 'informant' can prosecute. Capita bills these as private prosecutions in the name of an employee. An employee's legal identity is seperate from that of his/her employer as a matter of law, so the employer cannot take over the prosecution. You will find court proceedings are conducted by Capita in the name of 'TV Licensing'. So challenge Capita's right to prosecute when you get to the hearing. This is based on company law, which in part is law of legal identities and can apply in the criminal law as well as the civil law. You may not be successful, but raise it anyway, and use it in appeals. 'Private prosecution' - whats that? It is not just the government that can prosecute a criminal offence, anyone can, so long as it is in the public interest and there is no rule set for a given offence that only certain persons can prosecute it. Just because Capita classifies these as private prosecutions that doesn't mean that they are. They may well be public as Capita may eventually be deemed to be a 'public authority'. Now, if you do succeed in challenging Capita as prosecutor, immediately move for dismissal of the charge on the basis of passivity by the informant. One more thing - a private person could prosecute Capita for forging court documents!! Any takers?

UK TV License Resistance - The Summonse