Among yesterday’s front pages was a data visualisation which, at first glance, was one of the most effective I’ve ever seen: the Independent had made an infographic showing yesterday’s £6bn budget cuts in context - as a fraction of a debt mountain.
Then I looked closer - and something’s very, very wrong.
Can you tell what it […]
Gathered the below information for the excellent - and newly out of beta - helpmeinvestigate.com . Unfortunately, a gremlin in the system stopped this post appearing over there. So it’s here.
Right, here’s a round up of what’s out there through FOI so far - this is a frequently-FOI’d topic. Here’s what’re released - and what they’ve refused to release to previous requesters.
First up:
http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/foi/classes/disclosure_logs/rfi20080397_percentage_of_london_households_without_tv_licence.pdf
In which we learn:
Nationally, 2% of households don’t own a TV and an estimated 5.1% dodge their licenses. Only 4.3% of english household evade, while 11.1% in Northern Ireland dodge - interesting quirk, no?
The beeb refuses to release more detailed regional breakdowns in case it affects compliance rates (they suggest high levels of evaders might persuade others to dodge).
HOWEVER - An Information Commision ruling from this year (March) ordered the BBC to release some regional data - number of households with TV license and number of prosecution notices issued in each region - to the requester within 72 days. Presumably they’ve done that, but they haven’t put it on the log. Worth asking their press office/FOI officer to send to us too?
http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/foi/classes/disclosure_logs/rfi20080243_tv_licence_evasion_2007.pdf
Here we see how many evaders were caught in 2006 - 413,000 or so - but no mention of fines, prosecutions or otherwise. This is refused under the extremely obstructive grounds of being already published (Section 21(1)). Under Section 16 - duty to assist - they should link to, or attach, that information, and haven’t. Bad form, BBC. Number of enforcement officers is refused on the grounds of prejudicing prosecution of crime (s31 I think).
This one is fairly helpful:
http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/foi/classes/disclosure_logs/rfi20080008_enforcement_and_collection_costs.pdf
This is the enforcement costs etc as a percentage of income over a period of years.
Some figures from a pressure group here: http://www.itsmummy.com/tv_scabs_1.htm
There is also a rather comprehensive set of 141 FOI requests (including requests for detection equipment etc) here: http://www.onebillionpageviews.org/foi.html
An ICO ruling on the detection equipment is here: http://www.onebillionpageviews.org/downloads/FS50154106.pdf
Hope all that is helpful. I am trying like the blazes to find this home office stuff on the number of successful prosecutions (I can find reposts, which is useful but unreliable, but not the originals.)
If the prosecution numbers were accessible, we could maybe couple those with the numbers from the ICO appeal mentioned earlier, and try to infer whether areas have higher prosecutions due to higher delinquency or (over?) zealous enforcement in some regions.
Tags: BBC, Freedom of Information, help me investigate, TV licence
July 27th, 2009 at 10:45 pm
Looks good.
Anomaly on the side, notice the FOI section of Beeb hasn’t disclosed any 2009 yet
Check out whatdotheyknow. I downloaded a lot of FOI’s last night, to review what they disclosed and found similar things, they really don’t want to disclose on a decent location basis.
Want to try and get it on HMI? - On an aside they quote s31 a LOT!
The enforcement costs I’ve spotted before (they repeat them on a few. . no actual vs. budget, should be interesting to see variances)
Specifically they say cost of enforcement is going down (in their public interest reasons for non-disclosure)
July 28th, 2009 at 10:54 pm
Quote: ‘Nationally, 2% of households don’t own a TV and an estimated 5.1% dodge their licenses. Only 4.3% of english household evade, while 11.1% in Northern Ireland dodge - interesting quirk, no?’
Yep - and it’s unlikely Aunty’s taking her vans round the Garvaghy Road.
This takes me back to a an FOI RE: NI and the BBC I was struck by a few years ago - just re-found it here.
But then isn’t it be possible that RTE is available on analogue in NI?