Trends

Dare I venture that the Telegraph's reporting of tv licence fee prosecutions, which led early editions, picked up from City AM and egged on by Guido Fawkes, has not been Tony Gallagher's finest moment ?

Their headline  - TV Licence offences account for one in ten UK court cases - conflicted with their own copy, which said prosecutions represented 12% of magistrates' business. So that's closer to one in eight, isn't it ?  In the Telegraph version of events, 180,000 cases were brought, and there were 155,000 convictions. Surely, in Charles Moore-land, that's justice - 25,000 proved their innocence.

And there's the other bit the Telegraph missed, imagining magistrates handling tv cases every day. A spokesman for TV Licensing tells the Mail this morning "TV licence evasion cases take up a small proportion of court time as they are dealt with in bulk in dedicated sessions, and very few defendants attend court".

Meanwhile the Mail puts the total number of prosecutions in the most recent year at 193,049 - and clearly, what is more interesting is the trend. In the 2010 figures there were 165,000 prosecutions, resulting in 142,375 convictions, out of a total number of magistrate court cases of 1,642,548.