As a follow up to my blog post a couple of weeks ago, ‘Ron‘ from Linksway Hotel has written the following:
I have just been contacted by this society and been advised that I need to pay some £1800 per annum for hotel guests to view and listen to music in their rooms.
We pay for a Television Licence for the hotel.
The law states that once you have reserved a room in a hotel, it becomes your private residence,so any viewing of tv or listening to radio is deemed to be private.
It seems to me that someone at the PRS has gone a bit bonkers. I also received an email from an MP a couple of weeks ago saying that they had received a considerable amount of casework about this issue and was pursuing it further. Watch this space.
Threatening people with made-up demands for money has long been the business model of the ground rent collection agencies. Looks like it must work more widely.