If you look at your licence document (what, you mean you haven't done that recently?), you'll find a requirement to revalidate it every five years.
The need to revalidate is reasonable: OFCOM ensures it doesn't end up with a databases of people who have died or moved address, although there is anyway a need to communicate such changes independently of the revalidation process.
A good fraction - about 20% - of the 83000-odd licences held in the UK haven't been revalidated. That technically means that OFCOM can revoke them, but has never yet done so. Indeed, it seems unlikely to do anything about unvalidated licences for a long time.
Revalidating is a bit of a paper headache that can be made much easier so that operators don't forget to do it in time, and that OFCOM get what they want - an up-to-date register of licensees.
If OFCOM got itself together and set up an automated reminder to mobile phones, emails and so on, then it would appear to be by far the best way to get those revalidation statistics much improved. No doubt there are those in OFCOM would would like to do just that, but probably held back by corporate bureaucracy.
No comments:
Post a Comment