TV Licence charged twice

chirpycheap

My son who has just started at university has this evening tried to pay his TV licence on line. When he checked his balance he appeared to have been charged twice.
I have advised him to phone the TV licence people tomorrow and explain what has happened. How easy will it be to get the money returned? He has no idea how it has happened.

He is in a self contained flat within a large university complex and £145 is already steep enough but double that will really affect his finances (Bank of mum and dad may have to step in!)

Should he be doing anything else?

wiogs

He needs to do as you say and contact TVL to get a refund


If he wanted to save Bank of M&D some cash then he could just watch catch up TV programmes and save the licence fee altogether.

Nilrem

Contact the TVL and bank.

But it might be worth him checking to see if it's actually gone out twice - it's not too uncommon when paying for something with a card for it to get reserved (IE the amount is earmarked so the available balance goes down), then the actual payment goes through.

What should happen is the reserved funds should be the ones used for the payment, but sometimes it seems the payment by whoever gets taken from outside the reserved funds, so for a while it looks like it's been double charged.
When that happens the reserved funds will normally reset after a few hours/day or so (this pops up in relation to things like supermarket home shopping on a semi regular basis).

If it's actually showing as two payments ignore the last couple of paragraphs and contact TVL, I suspect they'll be able to sort it fairly fast as it's an obvious error.