IF I was Prime Minister, the first thing I would do would be to scrap all TV detector vans.

Then I would scrap the stupid BBC TV licence, but that's another story as Star readers well know.

Detector vans are the biggest and most stupid waste of time and money I know of.

We had a press release last week boasting about the new-look vans which would soon be touring the streets of High Wycombe cracking down on licence cheats.

Er, why? I didn't own a TV for several years in the 1990s and was constantly pestered by TV Licensing. I had several letters from them demanding an explanation for my lack of licence, and an officer even visited my home.

Other non-TV owners have told me similar stories. The premise always appears to be that anyone without a licence must be a cheat, because everyone has a telly these days.

So why are vans required if the snoopers use a system of picking on homes which aren't registered with them? Plainly, their daft detectors didn't help in my case.

They are an invasive, outdated organisation whose very existence is an affront to civil liberties.

When asked how much the vans cost, a TV Licensing spokesman told Editor's Chair: "The cost of having detector vans is set up against the loss of revenue through people not purchasing licences.

"The latest tenth generation detector vehicles are part of a national fleet covering the whole country. We never disclose how many vans we have."

Appropriately, their press release coincided with the centenary of George Orwell's birth last week. Perhaps even the great author would have been shocked that Big Brother was being employed to spy on whether or not you own an electronic device.

But it gets even more silly. The TV Licensing people told us the vans are like mobile technical rooms. It sounded to us from the description like the ones we see in spy flicks at the movies.

Katie Simpson, spokesman, said their technology enables them to cross ref householders with a TV with their own special databases of addresses with valid licences.

Once they have established who is illegally using their TV, they will swoop on them by sending an enforcement officer to make a visit.

I find this whole process absurd in a high-taxed society where the NHS is in chaos and our transport system doesn't work properly. Surely, this kind of advanced technology could be put to better use?

Instead, we appear to have a bunch of pseudo James Bonds sitting in MI5-type vans checking up on whether single mums have forked out for the privilege of watching the telly.

Sometimes, don't you think we Brits get our priorities a bit wrong?