Lisa Nandy is right to axe BBC licence prosecutions – mums are easy pickings for TV inspectors

I used to babysit for a single mum with three kids when I was a teenager in the 1980s. One day we were all watching He-Man on the telly and her youngest son, Joe, was running around doing his “By the power of Grayskull” impression when the front doorbell went.

I answered it, and froze with fear when I realised it was a TV licence inspector and his clipboard.

My late Irish dad used to ban us from opening our front door when the census takers were in town, and always refused to “answer their imperialist questions”. But on our North London estate, most families couldn’t afford a licence, so the TV inspector was the bogeyman.

When one of their vans was spotted on the street, the word went around and everyone turned their tellies down and closed the curtains.

My skint friend Carol mostly paid me in ciggies and Caramac bars when on the rare occasion I looked after her little ones if she had to go to a hospital appointment. I was mortified that I might have got her in trouble with her Radio Rentals TV set, and just babbled about it not being my house.

I don’t think Carol ever answered her door ever again in case they came back with a warrant!

Over the years I’ve despaired at rising numbers of women ending up in jail for non-payment of their TV licence fines. Nearly 1,000 people are prosecuted every week for not paying their fee, and around 75% of those convicted for evasion are female, mainly because they’re mums at home with kids and are easy pickings.

Now finally Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy is considering axing BBC TV licence fee prosecutions as someone in government has finally spotted that women are unfairly and disproportionately targeted.

If they couldn’t afford a TV licence in the first place, it’s a no-brainer they can’t afford a £1,000 fine. And so, our women’s jails are full of vulnerable women – 70% of them have been domestically abused – serving sentences for petty crimes like failure to make their children attend school in unsafe places where up to 24% of female inmates self-harm. Simply put, failure to pay fines, any fines, should never be a custodial sentence in a modern-day Clink gaol.

Just this week, I was listening to a menacing reminder advert on BBC Radio to scare students into getting their parents to pay for their TV licence, which seems a bit unnecessary as young people mostly watch YouTube and streaming services now.

I don’t want to see the TV licence fee scrapped because as a daily BBC Radio listener and viewer of iPlayer, I am happy to pay the annual licence fee every year. It works out at £14 monthly which is much more expensive than other streaming services like Netflix at £4.99, but I still think it offers good value.

I prefer to watch TV that isn’t full of adverts and whatever your politics, the Beeb does its best to remain impartial. You can tell, because people from both right and left accuse it of being biased, which means it must be doing something right.

However, one look at our Mirror postbag and all the letters from pensioners who tend to watch more daytime TV than me (although I did my fair share as a student and can recite the entire family tree of Sons and Daughters) tells me that not everybody is so happy with the programming.

Many readers complain that these days it’s full of repeats, and one wag even wrote, “If I’m paying to watch golden oldies, can I also pay the vintage price of a TV licence from back then too?”

Well, I’d happily watch repeats of Ronnie Barker’s Porridge and Open All Hours if it meant the BBC’s military arm, TV Licensing, didn’t casually criminalise so many women and force them to do porridge.

• Siobhan appears daily in the Mirror’s Community page.