A poll tax on entertainment! (TV Licence)

Member Name: oxjdc

Product:	TV Licence
Date:	13/08/00 (26 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: No adverts

Disadvantages: Poll tax, bad service, anti-competition

Who would believe that there is a nationalised industry in this country employing twenty-three thousand people, with an annual turnover of £3 billion, and a declared profit for the last financial year of £100 million. It enjoys a monopoly position, gets £400 million annually from the taxpayer, and a further two billion pounds charge that has to be paid by people merely to use its competitors.

If I had to pay several hundred pounds to Audi for permission to purchase a Renault, or twenty pence to Nestle for the right to eat Cadbury’s chocolate, I would probably consider these things unfair, indeed incomprehensible. Yet there is a more widespread acceptance of the licence fee. In fact the term "TV Licence" is misleading – almost all the revenue collected goes to fund the BBC. This was one thing when the fee was established, and the BBC were sole providers, but it is grossly out of date in a varied marketplace, of which the BBC takes an ever smaller share. What kind of free market do we have, when to buy any product of a particular sort, one has to pay a large sum to one particular manufacturer?

The traditional argument for state funding / compulsory contribution to services is that they are socially good in general, but nobody would be willing to pay enough individually for production to start – street lighting is a notorious example. Of course, the BBC provides radio and other services some of which may fit this description. However there is no radio fee, and you do not need a TV Licence if you only listen to the radio.

There is a human cost to this televisual poll tax - over the years thousands of people (over two thirds of them women) have been imprisoned for watching television without a licence, and being unable to pay the fine. The vast majority of these women were on benefits and, just under half of them had dependent children. No means test, no jury, no legal safeguards – a strict liability offence.


The irony is of course, that while the BBC are entitled to send state-sanctioned para-legal snoopers out to see what is going on in our living rooms, they are not on such solid legal ground themselves. How does a state-funded provider with a £2 billion head start fit in with free competition across the EU? That a station broadcasting from Calais cannot be watched by someone in Dover unless the first pay the British government looks an odd kind of Single Market indeed. Article 2a of the 1997 Broadcasting Directive states;

‘Member States shall ensure freedom of reception and shall not restrict retransmissions on their territory of television broadcasts from other Member States.’

The meaning seems clear. The argument that there is a ‘cultural protection’ exemption looks ever more flimsy as the schedules cram with American imports, and UK Gold show all the repeats of British Classics one could want in one lifetime. Similarly the case for ‘advert-free’ television is hopelessly flawed – if the viewing public want such a service, then pay-per-view could outperform advert-based broadcasts. As it is, ‘advert-free’ merely means full of adverts for the BBC and the ‘unique way it is funded’.

As the internet progresses, more and more demands will be made for interactive entertainment, and the same forces will apply to TV broadcasting. There is no sense in which it would be considered acceptable in a modern economy to charge an “internet fee”, payable to the designer of one website, before allowing a person to access other areas of the net. Of course that one lucky website would be very good indeed, but we wouldn’t think to justify such an imposition.

Yet we are doing just the same with the licence fee. A flat rate fee, adding up to a large portion of disposable income for some of those most reliant on TV as a pastime - the elderly (Gordon Brown̵
7;s initiative on free licences for the over 75s show that Labour instinctively understands the way forward, but is far too timid), those with young children, the house-bound and the workless. It is difficult for many of us, perhaps suffering from media fatigue, and information overload, to imagine how cut off someone can be without a TV - unable to join in the conversation with their friends about what was on last night, the quality of the football, or to keep up with the latest news.

The TV Tax is an embarrassing relic of an age when state monopolies were the norm for services that could be provided entirely adequately by the private sector. Enough of controversy about the Post Office and Air Traffic Control. This issue commands public support – 61% disagreeing with the statement “the BBC licence fee provides value for money”, and 56% believing it should be replaced with other sources of funding (MORI, May 2000). Let’s get on with the job – who knows, I have a sneaking suspicion it might play well for Labour with The Sun too ;)

jdcxxx

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