Are you paying for a TV licence?
If the answer is yes! Then what option do you use monthly DD, Quarterly DD, lump sum yearly or like some do you pay weekly?
The fee if paying weekly is £6, that's £312 per year, but the licence costs £159, likely to increase to £172 in April 2024, that will be £140 than a TV licence costs.
If a person pays weekly TVL try and claim that those who pay weekly can reduce the £6 fee down to just over £3 per week, £3.06 to the nearest penny.
I wrote a letter to a local paper in 2019 about the weekly fee, it was printed and someone from TVL replied saying that the £6 weekly fee could be reduced after 6 months to around £3 per week, they never tell the people that use this option of paying weekly that the £6 per week option can be reduced after 6 months and those who use this method would continue paying £6 per week for years or decades without knowing they could reduce the fee after 6 months.
I don't know when they first introduced the weekly payment option, the BBC claim it came into force on the 1/4/2017 but I seem to remember that the weekly option was available before that date. On the TV licence resistance forum someone posted that they had paid £6 per week for about 10 years from around 2009 to 2019.
In a FOI they stated that in 2019 there were 131,119 licences being paid for on a weekly cash payment plan. If the same number are still paying that fee today that's £786,714 per week that TVL is collecting, or £40, 909,128 each year as of the £159 licence at today's price. That's £20,061,207 more than the licence's cost.
When the licence fee increases in April 2024, possibly to £172 per year, it will take 29 weeks for the licence to be paid, will TVL increase the weekly fee? Possibly they won't as the £6 is still making them millions more than the licence costs, it will be down to £18,356,660 but still a hefty chunk on top of the licence fee.
What I would do if I had a licence and I was paying weekly is that I could total up the number of payments to paying just over the £159 then stop paying, to the nearest payment that is 27 weekly payments of £6. You have paid for the year so they shouldn't complain.
One pensioner on the weekly plan, in 2019, was fined for not paying when they were admitted to hospital, if they had paid £6 per week for over 27 weeks then the court should have thrown the case out as the person had paid for the years licence fee. If they had paid for more than 12 months then they will have paid two licences.
What people in the UK need to know is that if you only use services like Amazon, Disney Plus, Netflix, Pluto TV, Plex or any service that shows on demand content, except the BBC and their iPlayer, is that you can watch the content a few hours after it has being shown on the TV. You might have to put up with adverts unless you pay them for an advert free service.
