A mother has been convicted of not paying for a TV Licence because her nephew watched Match of the Day while she was in hospital caring for her sick baby.
The 31-year-old from Wolverhampton declared to TV Licensing that she does not need to pay the £169.50 annual fee because she only watches Netflix and YouTube.
But she was taken to court and handed a criminal conviction because her visiting nephew logged in to iPlayer on her TV to watch Match of the Day.
The incident happened after she and her 15-month-old son had gone into hospital for him to be treated for an infection and liver disease, a court heard.
The mother pleaded guilty in the Single Justice Procedure to a charge of “using a television receiver without a licence”, and a magistrate handed her a conditional discharge with £146 to pay in court costs and fees. She will also now have a criminal conviction against her name.
The circumstances of the incident were set out in the mother’s mitigation statement, which read: “When the offence happened I was at hospital with my son who is 15 months old. He has a liver disease and at the time he had an infection and we were in hospital from the 13th of August to the 1st of September.
“My nephew had come down on the weekend (31st August) to just do a check in on the flat and had used BBC iPlayer which I was unaware of until we had a visit from the TV licence guy.
“I live with my son and daughter at the flat and we usually only use Netflix and YouTube so I didn’t think we need a TV Licence.”
TV Licensing prosecutions are brought through the Communications Act 2003, which sets out that a licence is legally required by a person who has a television and “knows, or has reasonable grounds for believing” that someone else intends to use it to watch live TV.
When the mother was interviewed on the doorstep by a TV Licensing officer at the start of September, it was noted of her TV: “No channels was on and no channels tuned in.”
The officer was also told that her nephew was the one who watched BBC iPlayer while visiting.
Her case was fast-tracked to prosecution, without the chance of an out-of-court penalty, because she had declared previously that she did not need a TV Licence.
In a separate prosecution, an HR advisor from Lytham St Annes was convicted of not paying for a TV Licence when her sister, who does pay the annual fee, logged into iPlayer at her home.
She told the court her sister had come to her house to look after her daughter and signed into the BBC app because “she was of the understanding that as she has a TV Licence that there was no issues with this”.
“She confirmed that to her recollection it asked her if she could confirm she has a TV Licence – which as she does she clicked yes.
“When the officer came to my address and this was explained to him he confirmed that this isn’t the case as to who the BBC account belongs to, it is the fact that the app was used on my premises.”
The woman, 34, said she apologised to the TV Licensing agent and signed up for a licence on the spot, but added in her statement: “The only accounts logged in on my TV were streaming services (Netflix and Disney Plus) which is what I personally use.”
She was given an absolute discharge by a magistrate with no costs or court fees to pay, but she still received a criminal conviction.
They have the power to refer cases back to prosecutors once mitigation has been entered, but prosecuting bodies like TV Licence do not automatically see the letters due to the fast-track set-up of the system.
TV Licensing says prosecution in court is always considered a “last resort” after efforts are made to encourage people to pay the licence fee.
