OT : TV licensing - must I compy?

[Andy Hall]

[raden]

So does my son, away at Uni, need a license for his tv in halls ?

[Stefek Zaba]

Yes, assuming he has his "own" room (separate-lock-on-the-door is indicative, "real" criterion is the tenancy agreement: if you're a shared student house where all of you are named on one joint tenancy agreement, you're a single household and need just the one licence for the whole house; if the rooms are let separately, with each person having their own tenancy agreement (or similar arrangement with the Uni authorities), you need your own licence if you watch any TV.

That's wot it sez on the TV licensing website, anyway!

HTH - Stefek

[Andrew Gabriel]

The wording is "Use, by the persons referred to overleaf, of a television receiver anywhere, providing it is powered only by internal batteries". It might be argued that this would only apply if the licence was in the student's name at home, which wouldn't be a problem unless you had more than one child wanting to make use of this provision at the same time.

Another factor which might cover the set at Uni is if the hall has a licence and the hall provides meals. When I was in a hall of residence, I wrote asking what licences we needed. The answer was that a licence was required for each 'family unit' in a multiple occupancy premise, and a 'family unit' was defined as a group of people who would normally eat at least one meal a day together, which covered all 420 people in my hall as it had a refectory providing 2 meals/day all inclusive in the charges, and no self-catering facilities. OTOH, a self-catering hall would not be covered by this.

However, it seemed that each time anyone asked TV Licensing what the rules were, they got a different answer, so don't assume this still holds true today.

[Bob Eager]

Yes, unless it runs solely from internal batteries.

[Derek *]

All the above is correct.

If it's an ordinary mains telly, and if he's living in a place where he has an individual dwelling, IE room in halls, or room in a shared student house where he has a seperate tenancy agreement with the landlord all of his own... YES!

If a number of them share one single tenancy, they can share a licence.

I took my daughter to uni and the woman in charge of the halls said she was letting 500 rooms that day. That amounts to over £50,000 in TV licenses. The Uni overall has about 15,000 students that is about £1,500,000 in TV licenses. Scandalous, bearing in mind when my daughter lived at home we had 8 TV sets on one licence completely legally.

DG

[raden]

Glad I made him get one then

[Stefek Zaba]

Scanda-nothing, from where I sit. When I Were A Lad, I knew exactually one pair of students - emulating a Darby-n-Joan couple, her cooking his meals every day, in her pick slippers (i kid you not) - who kept a TV in their room. The rest of us piled into the nearest common room, bar, or pub on those utterly infrequent occasions when there was something earth-shattering going on; the ones with the incomprehensible-to-Stefek sporting addiction did this a tad more often than us normal types; the absence of a TV made najjer-all difference to the quality of social life, amount of beer and whiskey taken on board, flings and romances suitable and unsuitable, and late-night essay-writing on the 42nd day of a 6-week deadline.

The idea that every one of the 15,000 students you mention would want their own TV as part of their basic lifestyle paints a bizarrely dismal, atomised, isolated picture of student life that's unrelated either to my experience or the one lived by my older kids' year-or-two-older already-at-Uni mates. When she starts in September, I'm fully expecting to shell out for a desktop iMac or iBook, and the CD/radio thang in her room will doubtless travel with her; but I can't imagine she'll have the slightest inclination to take a TV. Mind you, ours are deprived kids - in the alleged minority of kids who don't have an idiotbox in their bedrooms...

[Owain]

"Stefek Zaba" wrote | Scanda-nothing, from where I sit. When I Were A Lad, I knew | exactually one pair of students - ... - who kept a TV in | their room.

I knew two people, and one of those was because the TV was primarily used as a monitor for the BBC Micro. Both TVs were black-and-white, for which the licence is about £35.

| .. the absence of a TV made najjer-all difference to the quality of | social life, amount of beer and whiskey taken on board, flings and | romances suitable and unsuitable,

the absence of TV probably increased all that :-)

Owain

[John Rumm]

sounds like a positive incentive to not have one then ;-)

[Andy Luckman (AJL Electronics)]

[Mike]

Afraid it is - or at least was. Remember all sorts of complaints in the trade rags about the paperwork this was creating. Their version of Part P :-)

[joedoe]

100,000 + people wiped out and the most active subject in the UK DIY NG is "how to dodge paying a small tax."

And, if we can combine this with making. or more generally repeating, cheap, sneering, stupid, comments about others, in order to demonstrate our superiority, so much the better.

But perhaps some of the money which you save will have been donated to the appeal ? HAHAHA

[raden]

In message , Mike writes

T'isn't, t'isn't t'isn't

See my previous post

Now I want everyone to be good and do something else instead of DIY

I'm off to Liege for a few days tomorrow

[Harvey Van Sickle]

On 29 Dec 2004, raden wrote

When we bought a DVD recorder just prior to Christmas, and asked why the shop wanted our address, we were told it was "for the TV licensing people".

Guess they were lying.

[raden]

In message , joedoe writes

Well, some of us elsewhere are talking about sponsoring a village

Of course, the major problem at the moment is finding one to sponsor

... and did anybody see Changing Rooms last night?

I think the BBC should have pulled it

[Andy Hall]

**plonk**

[Frank Erskine]

Agreed.

Actually it isn't a tax - it's only payable if you wish to receive broadcast television, which DOESN'T mean everybody in the UK.

TV nowadays isn't some sort of automatic public service, contrary to

50s ideas of service to the public.

[raden]

In message , Harvey Van Sickle writes

If you actually read the sub thread, you'll see that you ONLY get letters if you buy an appliance. I replied to the contrary

Do keep up at the back there

[Owain]

"joedoe" wrote | 100,000 + people wiped out and the most active subject in | the UK DIY NG is "how to dodge paying a small tax."

Well, this is *UK* diy. I don't recollect much discussion of the Cornish floods, which would at least have been on topic.

| But perhaps some of the money which you save will have been | donated to the appeal ? HAHAHA

Having done 12 years as an Oxfam volunteer I think I've done my bit.

Owain