Yes and no - I suppose theoretically anyone could bring a private prosecution for licence fee evasion.
The power to levy the fee does ultimately come from parliament, yes, in the form of a Royal Charter which lasts ten years. Take a look here.
Japan has a similar licensing fee that everyone with a TV must pay, though the Diet never actually included a penalty for non-compliance, humorously enough. Most people still pay, though (whether because of ignorance or because they want to be good citizens, I couldn’t tell you.)
Not quite true: if you have a device with a tuner - and that includes a PC with a TV card - then you have to pay the license fee. If you have a display without a tuner, and a DVD player, then you can play your DVDs to your heart’s content without incurring a license fee. My plasma screen has no tuner. If I were to get rid of my Freeview tuner, I could legitimately claim to not need to pay the license fee.
We’ve covered this issue several times before, but the same myth-understandings keep surfacing!
You have to pay the licence if you own a tuner or any equipment capable of receiving a broadcast television signal from the BBC. So even if you dislike all the BBC’s output, never want any of their TV or radio output and never want to listen to any of their regional orchestras etc., if you want to own a TV set you have to pay the licence fee. It is this imposition, of having to pay for something even if you don’t like it and don’t want it, that feels wrong to some people.
Is it a tax? We can get into muddy semantics here. The government periodically (every ten years or so?) reviews the licence fee arrangement, supposedly in discussion with the BBC, and decides what the licence fee will be. We are told the licence revenue goes directly to the BBC, not to central government, and AFAIK this is indeed the case. The licence fee feels like a tax in the sense that the government plays a part in its value and its enforcement, and because the BBC’s power to levy this tax derives from its government charter.
Those who invoke comparisons with paying a fee to any other provider of TV are missing the crucial difference: if I own a TV, I have to pay the licence fee to the BBC if I want to own a TV or anything like it, even if I have no interest in what the BBC are selling and would happily live in a world where the BBC doesn’t exist.
Those who cite the alleged ‘quality’ of the BBC’s output are also missing the point: yes, the BBC do some good stuff, and they also turn out acres of dross and rubbish that perhaps isn’t apparent to the overseas viewer getting a ‘sample’ of their output. The point is that the BBC gets my licence money even if I don’t want to watch their output, and only want a TV set to play my DVDs on and occasionally watch Sky Sports (for example).
The ‘It’s worth it for TV without commercials’ argument is also based on the misunderstanding that the BBC does not carry commercials. This point has been debated here before on the Boards, and can generate some heat. My point of view is that the BBC’s output (on TV and radio) is absolutely littered with commercials - it’s just that they are all commercials for BBC product. It’s true that the programmes themselves run without commercial interruption, but then again this is true of some non-BBC broadcasters. My friend in LA used to watch ‘Sex And The City’ on HBO and each episode ran without commercial breaks. People in the UK who watch movies on some Sky packages see the movie without ad breaks. So it’s by no means unique to the BBC model.
TV Detector Vans. Anyone who sells a TV set is required by law to fill in a form containing the purchaser’s details. This gets sent to the government-appointed agency that enforces the licence fee. Catching people who don’t pay the TV licence has always been a case of matching two lists of data: people who own TVs, and people who have paid the licence fee. If you’re on the first list but not the second, they’ve got you. TV detector vans were a PR exercise and a visual gimmick for ‘Get A Licence Or Else’ television ads in the 60s and 70s. They were never the real method of catching licence evaders and now they don’t even exist. These days, the anti-evasion ad campaigns are more honest and admit that it’s all down to computers finding discrepancies between the ‘owns a TV’’ and ‘has a licence’ lists.
Don’t forget the newspaper fee - everybody in Britain who has “equipment capable of receiving textual information” (eyes) must pay a fee to the British Newspaper Corporation, who produce a newspaper of their own which doesn’t carry adverts. Without it, we would have no source of print news unaffected by commercial pressures, and also it has some great articles that you just don’t get in the commercial papers.
OK, I made that up. That would be ridiculous.
In Ireland, there’s a similar arrangement, except the channels also carry commercials.
I pay fifty bucks a month for basic cable alone, just so I can watch Discovery, History Channel, Turner Classic Movies, and “Meerkat Manor.”
If there were fewer commercials, I might watch more shows.
By the way, jjimm is right that you don’t need a licence if you have a TV but don’t watch broadcast TV on it. If you can show that your TV is not tuned to any channels when the BBC’s goons come knocking, you’re in the clear.
Baah - we have a licence fee just like the UK, and we have adverts, so we get shafted both ways. Not that I mind, it’s a legitimate service fee (although I don’t know why radio owners, who derive some returns from my money, aren’t similarly charged).
On the other hand, our non-cable channels carry US cable stuff like 6 feet under and the like, so it’s not all bad.
I should point out that the license fee also pays for BBC radio (5 national channels, 1 internet channel, the World Service, and countless local radio stations), BBC News, the BBC website and all its streaming and podcasts, and all the BBC free-to-view satellite channels.
(IMO it’s unjustifiable in terms of principle, but by a quirk of fate it sort of works, so I’m not too unhappy to put up with it.)
That’s odd, I seem to get HD on my TV with an antenna. I also get two 24 hour weather channels, four PBS channels, and The Tube. The second I can get an HD recorder without having to pay extra fees for it I’m off of cable. I do live near DC, but there are plenty of places where one can pick up HDTV OTA no problem.
Usram - I take it back, looks like 2003 legislation changed it from merely posessing a TV, to ‘install or use a telelvision reciever’.
On the other hand, your newspaper ‘analogy’ gave me a good laugh.
Mi first thought: “ugggh, sounds like the DVD tax they want to impose” (we’d have to pay a fee on any electronic equipment that can be used to distribute data - excuse me all to blazes but I only distribute my own data and haven’t downloaded a movie in my life and YOUR MOM is a pirate! And she’s an inefficient one too!)
My second thought: “hm… if they put that here, wonder if I could use it as an excuse to throw my TV away? I only bought it for Mom… and she thinks with her wallet… hmmmm! Interesting possibility!”
The problem would be what to do with Mom, but I think I could just get all of Murder She Wrote on DVD, retrieve my old laptop from Lilbro, and plug the discs in. Mwahahahahaha!
BTW, I emailed the licensing authority about the use of a USB digital receiver for my laptop, and here’s the answer:
You can render such equipment incapable by merely detuning the channels. I know someone who has done this (the vicar at my church) - he owns several detuned TVs and uses them only to watch purchased pre-recorded content on DVD and VHS. The TV Licensing Authority tried to argue/badger him into paying the fee, saying that he could easily re-tune the TVs whenever he wanted, but their argument did not prevail. Whether they afforded him any extra lenience or credit for integrity because he’s a man of the cloth, I do not know.
One thing I do know (learned from a time when I went without a TV for several years) is that you are presumed liable for the fee and have to explicitly, and repeatedly declare that you do not own a set; the letter demanding payment does not anywhere even entertain the notion that you might not actually have a television set, and so you have to write a letter explaining it, each time, posting it at your own expense too.
Can’t be bothered to retype from the PDF on the TV Licensing site, but they claim that if you allow them to see the ‘main living areas’ of your house and they’re happy there’s no TV, then they’ll put a stop on their badgering for three years.
That may be something fairly new; it was some years ago that I went without the box. Even so, allowing them into your house to prove you don’t have a set is still presumed guilty until proven innocent, isn’t it?
OK, so there’s two separate objections. The first is to the concept of the licence, and a separate one is about enforcement. Irrespective of your opinions on the first question, how would you change things if tasked with the second? How would you minimise non-payment?
I think that says it all. I’ve argued against the licence fee on these forums, on principle, but OTOH I do personally like a lot of the BBC’s output, especially radio (who the hell actually listens to commercial radio?). I think the real problem with British TV is the stranglehold on subscription services that Sky’s near-monopoly has. With more competition in subscription TV it might be possible to have ad-free TV without a mandatory licence fee. Wouldn’t be cheap, though.
But it’s all moot anyway, because the idea of sitting down at an alloted hour to watch TV programmes is already starting to seem quaint. I watch less and less TV these days, and what I do watch is often recorded stuff on my DVR which I watch at a time of my choosing. Other people I know mainly watch stuff they have downloaded. TV will continue to deliver news, sports and other events that people prefer to watch live, but for everything else the internet will make it irrelevant. I expect it will be completely taken over by mindless phone-in game shows and shopping channels.