APPENDIX 67
Memorandum submitted by Mr Andy Carey
If you only ever watch Coronation Street you
have to pay it. If you object to 62 per cent of the BBC's money
being spent in South East England you probably have to pay it.
If you don't want or can't afford digital television and disagree
with paying for channels you can't get, you still have to pay
it in full.
It is of course the TV licence and approximately
two million households do not have one. Around 300,000 so-called
"evaders" are caught every year, and over 100,000 are
prosecuted. :Sixty-eight per cent of those prosecuted are women,
almost all those prosecuted are earning less than the average
wage if they are wage-earners at all. All of them were at home
during the day or early evening and opened the door to an Enquiry
Officer from the Television Licensing Authority (the TVLA), the
private company appointed by the BBC to collect the licence.
I have met a deaf woman and a single mother
who was fined for not having a licence. As a lip reader she rarely
watched TV herself but she considered TV to be essential so that
her two children could hear normal voices in the home. I have
also met a heroine addict who lived two streets away from his
separated wife in a high-crime neighbourhood. While he was away
looking for work in London, she slept alternate nights at his
house, and took a TV with her to watch. She got caught. The fact
that she was licensed at her address didn't stop her being fined.
These are not extreme examples. It stands to reason that the kind
of person who is at home during the day and who can't afford a
TV licence, is more likely to be on benefits or have children
to care for, and is least likely to be taking advantage of those
BBC services which require extra hardware, namely digital and
internet. At the end of the day the law should not be broken but
one had to feel sympathetic. As far as I know the BBC is the only
"public service" to which the poor pay a greater proportion
of their disposable income than the rich. Unlike say the NHS or
education it can hardly be called an essential public service.
Typical fines for evasion in the Magistrates
Courts are £120 + £45 prosecution costs. Once a person
has been fined, the legal system takes over. The costs of all
the administration, fine enforcement officers, warrants for the
arrest of non-payers and ultimately jail for those who wilfully
default on the fine, have to be met by the taxpayer. The complexities
of collecting fines are such that approximately 40 per cent of
all fines imposed in Magistrates Courts are written off or cancelled
by judicial action such as imprisonment. If the offender has to
seek debt counselling at a Citizens Advice Bureau, the taxpayer
has to cough up again. If you were a normal working person who
thought evaders deserved what they got, you should still be concerned
that nearly 10 per cent of the costs of running the Magistrates
Court service is due to this one offence. You probably have access
to more precise figures.
And the TVLA proudly say that last year two
retailers were prosecuted for not complying with the requirement
to pass on names and addresses of those buying a television. It's
not that big a deal but every TV you buy is a few pence per set
dearer because of the cost of administering this requirement.
But there is more. To maximise their income
and to make their lives easier, the TVLA has been misleading the
public. They want you to believe that any use of a television
without a licence is an offence. On their website it says: "Using
a television without an appropriate licence is a criminal offence."
And "There is no valid excuse for using a television and
not having a TV Licence." In their letters they send to unlicensed
households at regular intervals it says: "Anyone who uses
a television without a licence is breaking the law and faces a
fine of up to £1,000." What? Absolutely anyone? This
kind of wording is used repeatedly in all their publicity. The
truth is that a licence is needed if you use apparatus (of any
kind, TV, VCR, PC of any other) to receive or record broadcast
television services. If you detune your equipment, and remove
any aerial, then no licence is required. If use a TV only to watch
pre-recorded videos, as a monitor for a games console, a computer
or closed circuit television, of just to keep a nice clock on,
then you save £109 legally. You do not even need a licence
to watch a video of a programme recorded on a neighbour's (presumably
licensed) television, although there may be a breech of copyright
law in this case. The TVLA will only tell you the above information
if you ask them directly. Some of the above quotes are deliberate
falsehoods, and people who can't afford a licence are possibly
being misled into getting rid of their TV completely, or into
thinking that because they use it for videos or computer games
and wrongly believe they are breaking the law by doing so, they
may as well watch or record TV broadcasts as well.
Everything in life has to be paid for, but the
hurt caused by the BBC's method of funding is out of all proportion
to the benefit it brings. Alternatives include subscription or
putting it on Income Tax. One of the main objections to funding
for example the public service content (OU, schools, education,
possibly radio too) from taxation would be that the BBC's independence
would be compromised. I don't understand this as governors are
appointed by the Government, the level of the licence fee had
to be approved by Government and the BBC's Charter is renewed
by Government. Their powers and also their public service obligations
also ultimately come from Government so the BBC is not really
independent now. But if it were publicly funded, there could still
be mechanisms that allowed it to retain its tradition of independent-minded
broadcasting. After all the judiciary is publicly funded and they
can and often do reach decisions that are against the government
of the day.
Another common objection is that the BBC's income
would be squeezed by competing public spending priorities. I don't
see that the BBC is more important than Health, Education, Defence
and all the other public spending priorities, and that the BBC
should thus be protected in some special way that other public
services are not. Anyway, there are surely mechanisms to guarantee
the BBC an income stream, index-linked, and renewed by Parliament
every 5 years or so.
As for the TVLA's 500 Enquiry Officers, they
surely have many of the skills to become police officers where
they could contribute to solving and reducing real crime.
Anyway, thank you for raising the issue of the
BBC's funding in Parliament and good luck in the next four years.
10 February 2002
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