People who had lived in the UK always used to joke, "the British tax everything". We used to laugh but when we moved here, we found that it was true. There is a council tax, a car tax, income tax of course and you also need to pay for a TV Licence.
If you have a colour TV, you need to pay £135.50 (approx. US$274.13) and a black and white license costs £45.50 (approx. US$92.05), to be renewed annually.
Not paying may result in fines - starting at £200 for a first offense. I was wondering how they would know if someone didn't pay. Probably by looking at presence of satellite dishes or antennas. One of my friends (you know who you are) told us to get a good PC with a TV tuner built in and watch TV on computer and not pay for the licence. It seems like a good idea but as the website says:
You need a TV Licence to use any television receiving equipment such as a TV set, set-top boxes, video or DVD recorders, computers or mobile phones to watch or record TV programmes as they are being shown on TV.According to a report in the Coventry Times today, 1,386 people were caught watching TV without a licence in Coventry in the first 6 months of this year. I learnt that they are planning to use a fleet of detector vans and advanced handheld detectors to catch the defaulters.
Based on BBC's annual report, 75% of their revenue comes from TV Licence. No wonder they want you to pay up.
2 comments:
same here. we have to pay CHF450 per annum. thats roughly 300 euro. and we also get taxed on garbage bags. :)
Heard that they do that in Holland as well - I mean taxed based on the number of garbage bags. Fortunately it has not been implemented in UK as yet.
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