Examination of Witnesses (Questions 620
- 629)
THURSDAY 2 DECEMBER 1999
MS LINDA
LENNARD AND
MS MARLENE
WINFIELD
620 The poor in our community are suffering for
it.
(Ms Lennard) We would clearly share your
concerns there. The difficulties of people on low incomes and
other vulnerable consumers are very much at the top of our minds.
(Ms Winfield) And, of course, these decisions need
to be taken with strong consumer representation. All the various
interests need to roll their sleeves up and negotiate and come
up with something that meets the needs of consumers in a way that
allows a commercial sector, a vibrant commercial sector to be
there if that is what is required, a public service broadcaster
like the BBC to be there if that is what is required. We need
not to let this all happen because it can happen but happen in
some strategic way.
Chairman
621 In your paper you deal with the issue of
the licence, the principle of the licence and you advocate decriminalisation.
Is it not very peculiar and deeply regrettable that although there
are some people of ample means who dodge the licence, on the whole,
as we found in a previous inquiry, the people who do not pay the
licence are the people who cannot afford to pay the licence, often
the lone women with children. Quite apart from the concessions
that you deal with, is it not about time that the way to deal
with people who do not pay the licence is simply to get the money
back from them rather than to fine them or even threaten them
with jail?
(Ms Winfield) Yes. Taking you back to
my days many years ago as a social worker, visiting women in high
rise apartment blocks with young children, for them television
was a necessity, it really was. It brought the outside world into
them, it entertained their children for part of the day so that
they could have a break. This again will change in the future.
Television will become more of a necessity for various reasons.
We really need to look at what services television provides, who
needs them and how they should be paid for. Yes, it is fair enough
to say if we had taken a public policy decision that everyone
must pay something towards access to television, then yes we will
have to try to recover the money but trying to recover the money
from somebody who is living on income support on the bread line
already, we need to think whether that is really fair and the
sort of society that we want to operate.
622 There is another aspect there, which is not
for this Committee, high rise blocks are owned by local authorities,
is it not wrong for local authorities to put women with small
children on higher floors of high rise blocks?
(Ms Winfield) Chairman, I could do you
three days' work on tower blocks.
Mr Maxton
623 It is wrong to build tower blocks in the
first place. Coming back to quality and the basic principle of
the TV. I accept what you say about criminalisation and so on
and I think it could be made a debt as it is with other things
in social security and so on if necessary. In terms of the basic
principle of paying, as I come back to the quality argument, do
you not agree that the BBC's production, its record, its archive
material, all the rest of it, is down to the fact that over the
last 70 years it has had an independent funding, independent of
commercial factors and independent of the state? Is that not the
basis of the BBC and the basis of its quality?
(Ms Winfield) Yes. Even if I did not
think so before this morning, listening to Kelvin MacKenzie speaking
about it as if audiences and programmes are commodities —
624 For his profit.
(Ms Winfield) Yes. Commodities, yes,
to be sold on the market.—I would certainly have thought
so after that. Yes, obviously not having the same commercial pressures
does allow the BBC much more scope to be innovative, creative
and take risks. I think that is beyond question.
(Ms Lennard) What we would question is the extent
to which it fulfils its mission and actually what that mission
is or should be which is why we want the issue looked at as a
whole.
Mr Maxton: If we accept that the licence
fee is the way of ensuring that the BBC can produce high quality
programmes independently, is it not perhaps better that we start
to look at the way in which the licence itself works, not just
in concessions to those who are poor? I have been arguing for
some time the licence is a broadcasting licence not a TV licence.
It is based historically on one house having one radio and everything
is built from that. Now we have households which are multi-users
of broadcasting facilities only still paying one licence. Of course,
if you happen now or from next year anyway to have your 76 year
old granny staying with you then you will get your broadcasting
licence for nothing.
Mrs Golding: Good. They deserve it.
Mr Maxton
625 They are taking you in, are they, Llin. Is
it not time we looked at the TV licence in a broader way so that
we start to look at making payment for individual units?
(Ms Lennard) I think we want the licence
fee looked at in a much broader way because of its regressive
nature and the fact it does bear so heavily on low income households.
We do not necessarily accept that it is the long term solution
to funding. Hopefully our report at least explores some of the
other options that may be available on the table but that is why
we think we have to go back to basics and have it all out on the
table. If the licence fee is retained then how could that be made
fairer? We need to go back to fundamentals.
626 Lastly, of course, ultimately presumably
the licence will be a smart card and if you have not paid it and
you put it into the TV it simply will not turn on.
(Ms Lennard) Then it ends up as a subscription
and then we start talking about access which is why we have to
bring it all together.
Chairman: The point that Mr Maxton makes
goes right to the heart of the matter because there is no conceivable
justification for me being prevented from turning my TV set on
if I have already paid my subscription to Sky television. Why
should I be prevented from watching Sky if I do not pay a tax?
Mr Maxton: Even if you watch BBC on it.
Chairman
627 I hardly ever watch the BBC, but that is
a different matter. Mr Maxton has clarified the fact that the
licence was introduced as a tax on ownership of an article, it
was not introduced as a way of funding the BBC. It was a tax on
owning a TV set in a way that the dog licence was a tax on owning
a dog. The dog licence was there to try to ensure that only people
who could afford seven and six pence would take on the responsibility
of having a living creature in their homes. The TV licence was
an extension, namely a tax on owning an article, by what my colleague
Mr Ken Livingstone would call a stealth tax. It was then extended
to funding the BBC, which is not what it was intended to be. Can
you imagine now what the outcry would be in this country if the
Government analogously decided to place a tax on owning a computer?
(Ms Lennard) Yes. We can only but agree
with you. Again, it comes back to why we think we have to come
back to basics but not only think about how we fund and pay for
a concept of public service broadcasting but what that is, and
how also that impinges on other very important issues to do with
universal access and universal access to what as a society we
think should be universally available. We see all of these strands
as being quite inextricably intertwined together. We do think,
yes, we do need to question in the long term the survival of the
licence fee and how we fund the BBC. It is also tied up with what
we think we should have access to and, in particular, what kind
of access, what affordable access and what choice of access.
628 You were talking, Ms Winfield, about the
mum with small kids who has a TV set as an absolute necessity.
Without in any way casting aspersions on what she herself wants
to watch when the kids have been put to bed, what she basically
wants of that TV set is that she can park the kids in front of
it to watch cartoons and she can do that with practically any
service there is. She does not need the BBC for that, does she?
(Ms Winfield) I would question several
of the assumptions behind that question. I used to park my children
in front of Play School when they were little but they
actually learned quite a lot from it. No, she does not necessarily
have to get that through the BBC but then we are talking in this
age of convergence and technology about a number of things which
may be viewed as necessity, supplied by a number of providers,
and again it goes back to looking at what people actually need
and who should be providing it and how it should be funded and
how it should be regulated and also the need for a consumer body
that can go in depth into what is increasingly a very, very important
question for lots of people. In fact, your previous question about
the radio led me to think about how many things which used to
be regarded as luxuries we would now regard as necessities in
our lives.
629 Thank you. Once again, I think the entire
Committee share the satisfaction I certainly have in reading a
document that unlike everything we have ever heard so far, whatever
its merits in this inquiry so far, is not aimed at the interests
of the producer but the interests of the consumer. Thank you very
much indeed.
(Ms Lennard) Thank you.
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