The TV licence is a regressive tax but how else will the BBC be funded? - David Behrens
It’s a good job they’re reinstating the winter fuel payment this year because I was seriously considering burning my TV licence to keep warm. Oh, it wouldn’t have stayed alight long but probably longer than I watch BBC One these days.
There are bits of the BBC that are precious natural resources and other bits – vast deserts, really – that exist only to pad out the schedules between the breakfast news and the national anthem. The trouble is that no-one can agree on which bits are which. One man’s Songs of Praise is the next man’s Mrs Brown’s Boys.
So let’s play a game of Public Service or Pointless. Which of these is worth your £174 a year: Bargain Hunt, EastEnders or The One Show? Or, for that matter, Pointless Celebrities? None, if you ask me, but someone will raise a stink if they threaten to cancel any one of them.
Then there’s the wireless: with every commentator, entertainer and ex-BBC journalist now presenting their own podcast, is even Radio 4 now superfluous?
This week the BBC decamped with the rest of the industry to the Edinburgh Television Festival, an annual excess of schmoozing and backstabbing – mostly the latter, from my memory of it – and while their backs were turned, the knives were being sharpened for them.
The Chancellor was reported to be planning a raid on the rich that would lift the burden of disproportionate council taxes from poorer families. Taken to its logical conclusion it would also signal the end of the TV licence.
How could it not? That annual £174 is the most regressive tax of all: the less you earn the more you pay, proportionally speaking. If you don’t pay at all, you risk being prosecuted and if you still don’t cough up they can send you to prison.
Council tax works in a similar way. The amount you’re charged on your band B terrace in Knottingley is roughly the same as a band B pied-à-terre in Notting Hill worth 10 times as much. Apparently and inevitably, the Chancellor has come to the conclusion that this is unfair and if it is, the TV licence must also be.
Strangely, none of the executives in Edinburgh seemed to have cottoned on to this. Too busy congratulating themselves, I suppose. But the question when they return to their offices is what will replace the licence. How will the BBC fund itself if it can no longer threaten to bang us up for not contributing?
The standard, knee-jerk response in this debate is to forecast a cultural catastrophe if the Corporation is lost to us. Where would we turn for entertainment and reliable, impartial information? Actually we’d turn to ITV or Channel 4, but the answer is as shallow as the question because it’s based on the fallacious assumption that the only choices open to us are to keep the BBC as it is, pickled in aspic, or lose it completely. Neither option is likely nor desirable and between those extremes lies an infinite number of more nuanced, practical solutions that would make public broadcasting better, not worse and secure its future for a generation that watches less and less TV.
The director-general, Tim Davie, is on record as saying the BBC should exist to support the creative sector as a whole rather than compete with the rest of it, which has always been its instinct. That would represent a monumental cultural shift. Its presence as an online news provider has horribly distorted the market, undermining commercial publishers and forcing some of them into a grotesque race to the bottom in search of clickbait stories that will keep them afloat.
The scarcity of trustworthy content online, partly as a result of this state of affairs, paradoxically reinforces the argument for a strong BBC presence but weakens the case for funding it from another medium entirely, a tax on owning a television set.
So where could the money come from instead? The chairman, Samir Shah, preempted Rachel Reeves when he suggested earlier this year that he would not be averse to a less regressive regime. “Why should people who are poor pay the same as people in wealthy households?” he asked, rhetorically.
He did not go into detail but his staff will have done the maths. They must have: the BBC has hundreds of executives who don’t make programmes, whose job is to come up with solutions before solutions are foisted on them.
But they’re keeping their powder dry because the moment they propose a concrete alternative they will have effectively admitted that the licence fee era is all over.
Well, if they didn’t think it was before, it is now. The movement against regressive taxes has made a bonfire of all our licences. It’s the BBC’s turn to play Public Service or Pointless.