Now that the Jubilee, Olympics and Para Olympics have finished I thought I would have a go at revalidating my licence again despite those nice people at Ofcom already renewing it for me until February next year.
I went onto the Ofcom site but it was as I thought it would be, I could not for the life of me remember my username or password. I thought I knew my username so I went down the path of asking for a password reset. This invokes a security question that I set nearly six years ago, however it is one that I have used a number of times before. Unfortunately my answer was rejected so I changed the format slightly to the other variant that I use, this too was rejected.
Not to be deterred I rang the Ofcom helpline and after about 5 minutes of button pressing and navigation through the various menus and listening to the recording telling me that I could do everything licence related via the website
and then warned that everything I said would be recorded (to protect the staff), I eventually arrived at a human voice. After explaining the situation and the fact that I could not remember my password and had failed in changing it I was told that the reason for the failure was not my fault but down to the fact that I had two accounts and the logon system could not differentiate between the two. I had one account for my licence created by Ofcom and another one created by myself, (an operation I was told I had to do when they introduced the re-validation regime). Apparently, to make the system work for me, these two accounts had to be merged. The lady told me that she would do the necessary adjustments and I should wait an hour or so before trying again. She added that I should then be able to change my password if I still could not remember it. I took the opportunity of confirming my username with her before thanking her for her assistance.
I am pleased to announce that I have now successfully logged on and re-validated my licence until 13th September 2017. Not only that but I have corrected the postcode error that Ofcom made for my address when they transposed my details.
I assume that if all licensees have registered as asked when the new system started, they will all end up with two accounts and have the same problem as me which will then have to involve intervention from Ofcom to regularise the account.
K
Just a note in the birthday page of your filofax would do the trick.
