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We won't pay the licence fee. We want to pay something better
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be the first to commentPosted by Tim Gopsill
The BBC licence fee is untenable in its present form. A new system must be devised to keep the funding of the BBC in the hands of the citizens and not the state.
For years campaigners for public broadcasting have always said, retain the BBC licence fee, naturally. It has long come under fire from corporate competitors and when the renewal of the BBC Charter comes up next year, the enemies would be right if nothing were changed.
First, they will say that the fee is a flat rate levy, the same for rich and poor, and with the force of law. The poor are thereby criminalised and occasionally imprisoned for their inability to pay. It’s not an imprisonable offence not to pay the fee but about 50 people a year are jailed for failure to pay the fine and they are all poor people.
Leading Tory MP John Whittingdale, chair of the Commons culture committee, has said that it is worse than the poll tax in this regard because that had relief for the poor. Other Tories have shown equally moving compassion; it may all be wholly bogus but that’s not the point. The fee is unfair.
Both the BBC and the Commons committee have been working on schemes to “de-criminalise” the fee. Fortunately they have not yet chosen to advance such a plan. The fact is that decriminalisation is unworkable: the day after it’s introduced the right-wing press would launch campaigns for non-payment, which they are constrained from doing at present because they can’t really exhort people to break the law.
And in any case you couldn’t keep the fine for non-payment (generally a standard £160) but remove the risk of imprisonment, because you can always be jailed, or have your possessions seized, ultimately, for not paying a fine.
The second argument is the fee’s technological redundancy. It is still based on the ownership of a TV set, a big flat box full of wires, at a time when more and more TV viewing is done online. Recent Ofcom research showed that more than a million households now watch TV channels exclusively online and do not possess a set. In 10 years’ time for the next BBC round there may not even be such a thing as a separate TV set. This is another objection to the licence fee that you can see coming.
So what to do? Of the various alternative means of payment, the best solution would be a household charge levied with the council tax. This could have the great advantage of graduated rates, varied according to the council tax bands, say from £100 to £200 a year. People on housing benefit who have their council tax paid for them will be exempt.
County police forces are funded in this way, though the charge is the same for all taxpayers. The same is the way they raise the equivalent audio-visual tax in France; that again is flat rate, though there are exemptions.
There will be bureaucratic resistance and part of the revenue will have to go to local authorities to pay for the collection and administration. But it avoids the problem of levying the fee through national taxation which would put it in the hands of government.
DATELINE: 27 February, 2015
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