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Miss Begg: I am sure that, like me, the hon. Gentleman has spoken to many pensioner groups and many individual pensioners. I was constantly asked why pensioners could not receive free TV licences, as happens in other countries. The genuine desire articulated by pensioners was for free licences.
Mr. Bottomley: I do not want to come across as the only hon. Member who wants to spoil the party, but those who will decide what to do with television licences in future may read this debate, and they ought to be made aware of some of the points that the Minister would no doubt have made if Liberal Democrat or Conservative Members had come up with the idea of free television licences for people over 75.
The points that I want to make would have cropped up in consultation. The process of consultation, involving working parties and taskforces, is used in almost every aspect of Government these days. That did not happen in this case, and the result is a scheme that is not as good as it could have been.
Janet Anderson:
Does the hon. Gentleman support the Government's proposal to give free television licences to the over-75s, or not?
Mr. Bottomley:
It ought to be clear that I do not oppose the proposal, but that I am trying to talk through the logic behind it. I am not setting myself up as an Enoch Powell, for whom only logic worked. However, I think that it would have been better to present a scheme that provided benefit worth £104, so that people paying tax might find that they had to contribute a little more, while those who do not pay tax would not. Such a scheme would also ensure that people paying at the higher rate of tax would not get a greater benefit.
My reason for arguing against child tax allowances is that they give no help to those below the tax threshold; that they give the greatest help to those paying the highest rates of tax, and that they do not make much difference to those on ordinary levels of income. The same argument applies to pensioner households over 75 years of age.
It is not sensible to give free television licences to all pensioners because many people in work who have children face far more difficult budgeting problems than they do when they retire. Forty years ago, it used to be the case that people were most hard up when they retired, but nowadays it is when they have their first child, when they often go from having two incomes and two mouths to feed to having one income and three mouths to feed at a time when housing costs are at their greatest.
My starting point is that we should not give unalloyed praise to the scheme. Consultation would have helped and would have caused the Government to propose a modified scheme that would have had roughly the same effect, without some of the unfairnesses that I have illustrated.
I accept that many people over 75 years of age now are vulnerable, but I suspect that many people who turn 75 in 20 or 30 years' time will not feel anything like the same squeeze on their financial resources. If 75 per cent. of
35-year-olds are paying for their own homes and will have paid off their housing costs by the time they retire, they will be in a very different financial situation from today's over-75s, who do not necessarily have second pensions, extra savings, and their housing costs paid. The arguments for free television licences for those over 75 in the year 2000 will not be the same as they will be in 2020.
Mr. Webb:
One might assume that, but the projections of the Department of Social Security and other research evidence show that, if anything, older pensioners will be getting further and further behind the rest of the pensioner population. One reason is that they tend to be women, who always tend to be further behind, but there are many other reasons as well. It is not obvious that targeting by age is a policy that is right for now but not necessarily right in the future.
Mr. Bottomley:
I was making a rather more narrow point. People who will be 75 in 40 years' time are now 35. A lot of 35-year-olds are buying their own homes, and I suspect that that will continue. If the average rate of owner-occupation in this country is getting on for 70 per cent., and if a relatively low proportion of people between the ages of 60 and 85 own their own homes, it must be that successive cohorts will be moving through.
Mr. Webb:
That is wealth, not income.
Mr. Bottomley:
It is wealth, and savings and second pensions will increase that. Again, that argument can be made for income, taxation and benefit policies. I am trying to establish that what appears to be right now is not necessarily the fairest, most equitable way of providing quality television and reasonable equality in paying for it, which is what we are after.
We have three public service television channels--BBC 1, BBC 2 and Channel 4. Channel 4 is not funded by the licence, but it is public sector broadcasting. In another debate, it would be interesting to hear whether the Government plan to privatise Channel 4 and take the money. I hope that they do not. There are good arguments for Channel 4 to remain in its slightly anomalous situation. Incidentally, anomalies on the licence and in the regulations have been mentioned. Willie Whitelaw, when Home Secretary, was asked whether he understood that there were anomalies, and whether he could search for alternatives. He stood up and, with a straight face, said that he would be perfectly happy to search for alternative anomalies. Almost any way of solving anomalies creates others, at least at the borderline.
I declare that the BBC has given me some hospitality over the years, often at BBC events. I have tried to turn up at the events that do not offer more than a cup of coffee when the BBC is talking about its great work on the World Service and other areas that are not funded by the licence fee. The licence fee basically pays for BBC 1 and BBC 2.
I repeat my question to the Minister, in the hope that she can give a broader answer when she winds up the debate. If not, perhaps she could write to me and put a copy of her reply in the Library. Roughly what are the sources of the extra £490 million that she, her Department
or the Treasury believe can be produced from within the BBC, over and above the BBC's estimate of £600 million? Is it just a difference between what John Birt thought he could produce and what Greg Dyke thinks he can produce, or is it something different? If it is a ministerial estimate, let us be told. If the figure comes from the BBC, it would be helpful to know.
Janet Anderson:
Let me reassure the hon. Gentleman that the £490 million is not a figure that we have simply plucked out of the air. It was based on the scrutiny of the BBC's finances by the Pannell Kerr Forster report. I repeat that the money will come from increased efficiency savings, reductions in bureaucracy and increased commercial revenues.
Mr. Bottomley:
I am grateful for that reply, but I thought that that was where the first £600 million was coming from. If we can raise that figure by an extra 40 per cent., perhaps those accountants would be rather useful in other Departments as well. I shall not pursue that, however. Presumably, Ministers will make available more detailed information if they have it and, if they do not have it, they will say so and it will be just one of those things.
In the regulations, we want to ensure that, reasonably fairly, we protect and enhance public service broadcasting. I want to quote from the McKinsey report from January 1999 on public service broadcasters around the world. It concluded:
I fear that if we keep the BBC too strapped for cash, we will not be able to allow the development of broadcasting in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and, for that matter, England. England is not quite so critical because English culture spreads out and becomes almost British culture in significant part.
I hope that, in time, Ministers will find it possible to use one of the three public service broadcasters as national broadcasters for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Sometimes, we have broadcasting too tightly controlled at the centre. I know that the BBC has done quite a lot to devolve editorial control of programme making to Scotland and, no doubt, to Wales. There has also been discussion about the fourth channel in Wales, but that may be a debate for another day. The question is whether the settlement will be sufficient for the BBC as it is at present.
I should have preferred the increases to be larger. I represent a constituency with the highest proportion of people above retirement age--55 per cent. are below retirement age and 45 per cent. are above it. I suspect that many of my constituents would agree with the 89-year-old widow who wrote to me in connection with an audiology test saying that the only enjoyment that
she had left in her life was listening to the radio and television. The trouble was that, as she did not have a hearing aid, her neighbours heard more of it than she did.
Many elderly people find the BBC and the other broadcasters a lifeline. They keep people in touch with what is going on, they provide entertainment and education and they are informative. They are good value. If one takes the cost of the licence fee as providing BBC services alone, it is well justified, given the broad reach of the BBC. I am becoming more and more confident that it will be justified when the charter comes up for renewal the next time. I know that there were doubts in the last decade about whether the licence fee system could last. I want to make a suggestion about how we could do it next time.
Public service broadcasters have a significant responsibility within their markets. As the pacesetters, it is the public service broadcasters who set a tone for broadcasting. Healthy public service broadcasters can potentially greatly enrich their broadcasting cultures and by extension the cultures of their nations. It is in the interests of all audiences to see that they continue to do so, and keep broadcasting the broad-ranging, stimulating, unifying social force it has been for much of the last century.
I hope that the settlement for the BBC--a fairly minor increase, although I accept that it makes up about 8 per cent. of the increase in the basic state pension--will manage to achieve that, not only in national broadcasting but in broadcasting within the nations of this country.
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