It might end up that way. The BBCs charter is renewed every ten years, and the funding model is always one of the considerations in the renewal.
But, here’s an example. The current World Cup matches are divided up between BBC and ITV (the largest free-to-air commercial network). Tonight’s final is going to be on both networks though - the BBC will totally dominate the ratings for this. It always does.
The BBC has been quite free from government intrusion, influence, and some laws, it seems :mad:
But, OTOH, the quality of its output is often much higher than the other ‘free’ channels we receive. I personally haven’t seen an advert in years, either downloading series or watching the Beeb live. ITV is usually terrible but Ch4 has some good output. The BBC licence fee is justifiable, when only watching its backlog of nature and other documentaries, IMO.
I have not had a TV for 10 years.
I get letters on a regular basis from the TV licensing authority making all kinds of threats. So I ignore them.
I once had a guy visit and told in that: No, I did not have license and No I did not have a TV. He was one of the thousands of ‘investigators’ they employ to chase people.
I have a friend who revealed something of how they operate when they catch someone. He was not well off, his wife was at home, the young children sitting in front of the TV. The TV licensing man calls and asks to the two questions. It is fairly obvious from the sound of the TV that they have one, so No license and Yes they had a TV. A couple of weeks later they recieve a Summons to attend Court and my friend decides to have his say in front of a judge and jury.
It did not quite happen like that. He went to the court house, spoke to the clerk. He says he would like to contest the charge and challenge the fine. They guy looks at him and rudely just says ‘Name!’. So my friend tells him his name and the clerk goes though a stack of papers on his desk until he finds the right one. The he just holds it up and drops it in a waste paper bin. And that was an end to the matter.
The rest of the papers would go through to a magistrate for fines to be imposes. Usually £200 or so. Many of the offenders will be single women with small children living on welfare.
Here is how it was in the bad old days, when many more people were sent to jail for the non-payment of the fines for not having a TV license.
These days it is about 50 a year.
However…look at how many prosecutions there are:
180,000! That is more than 1 in 10 of all Court cases.
TV Licensing in the UK is expensive, the Licencing authority is aggressive and has the advantage of using the Criminal law, which it uses by default to punish offenders. It runs TV campaigns that make people fear the ‘knock on the door’ and it sends out letter relentlessly insisting that households sign declarations that do not own a TV set and this has to done every year to keep them off your back.
This is the dark side of the BBC.
You won’t find them doing any investigative reporting into this subject, that is for sure.
However, the subject of how the BBC is to be financed comes up regularly. It is used to place pressure on the BBC when politicians feel it has been snooping in places that they find embarrassing.
This is quite a ridiculous situation. The BBC could be financed by a levy on good with a TV tuner or just out of general taxation. We may soon have a law that makes not having a TV license matter for the civil law rather than a criminal law, which is a step in the right direction. The BBC, of course, fears it will not have enough money for all those wonderful David Attenborough Nature programs.
I have often mused (usually at tax time) that schools should be financed by people with children in school, but I doubt most people could afford it.
It is generally considered that it would be a very bad idea to finance the BBC out of general taxation, because this would mean that the revenue of the BBC would become part of the general budget appropriations process, with spending targets set every year by the government and constantly adjusted and micromanaged. This would make it far too easy (and tempting) for the government to to exert inappropriate influence on BBC programming. The current rather ramshackle system has worked quite well to prevent this. Although the government has ultimate control over the BBC budget, it is kept at arms length, and cannot be asserted on a short time scale. The costs of the rather ineffectual system of licence fee enforcement is the price we pay for the BBC’s editorial freedom (as well, of course, as its freedom from the need to please advertisers). Well worth it, I would say. It might be possible to devise a better and more efficient way to fiance the BBC whilst preserving its editorial freedom, but financing out of general taxation certainly is not it.
I am not sure what you mean by “a levy on good with a TV tuner”, but if you mean a levy imposed when someone buys a TV or other device capable of receiving programmes, I do not think that would be practicable. People do not generally buy such devices very often, certainly not every year, so to match current levels of licence fee income the levy would have to be unacceptably huge, adding quite a few hundreds of pounds to the purchase price of any TV, tablet computer, or whatever. Not only would this be unacceptable to the public, it would kill the market in new televisions, tablets, etc., and would be very unfair to anyone buying multi-purpose devices, such as iPhones, mainly for purposes other than watching TV on them.
A lot of people here do still get TV through an antenna; having cable or satellite was seen as a rather down-market thing to do. Recently they switched off the analog TV signal (actually in stages around the country) forcing people to do ‘something’ if they wanted to go on getting TV. You could get a converter box, but you would probably have to upgrade the antenna to get a usable signal. Even with a new (higher) antenna, and an amp on it, our signal was frequently breaking up, more on some channels than others, and even then you had to rotate it to the East Anglia signal, which was was less bad than the London signal, so your ‘local’ news was “What’s Hot in Norwich” or something similar. We gave up and got cable. Many people probably did something similar. I ought to be able to sue the BBC for their crappily engineered transmission network
Digital was supposed to make reception easier, but I can’t get a signal at my house.
There are many ways in which the licence fee could be collected rather than the current system, which must be very expensive to collect and relies on intimidating with threats and imprisonment.
The BBC Charter comes up for review in a couple of years, I look forward to some constructive proposals for an alternative way to finance the BBC.
Could the PBS model work? Just use general taxes/borrowing to pay for it, and ask for donations 95% of the year?
Dear G-d, I would quite willingly pay the licens(c)e fee rather than listen to that begging drivel.
Absolutely! Rather ads than PBS and NPR style pledge drives!
And note that PBS is a shoestring and almost amateurish operation compared to the BBC, and buys half its programming from the BBC anyway.
Also, I do not think it has been mentioned that the BBC now puts out 4 national channels of TV, as well as all of its radio stations, national and local. It is not a single channel a PBS is in most places. You don’t get that sort of quantity, let alone quality, for charity peanuts.
In my opinion filmstar-en is greatly exaggerating the problems of the licence fee system. Like any system for almost anything, it has its problems, but it mostly works pretty well in practice, and rather few British people seem to be seriously unhappy with it. Certainly I have yet to hear any proposal for an alternative that does not seem virtually guaranteed to be worse.
Actually that is wrong. It is four channels of general TV (entertainment, documentaries and news - although admittedly two of the channels are not 24 hour) plus a 24 hour news channel, a parliament channel (roughly equivalent to CSPAN), I think two children’s channels, and a Welsh language channel.
Don’t the figures speak for themselves - all those court prosecutions?
The TV license fee collection in the UK relies on 4million home visits by ‘investigators’ each year.
The BBC also carries many advertising campaigns on TV, radio and the newspapers attempting to shame or make people paranoid about not having a TV license.
No-one likes this.
Moreover, the tactics used by these door to door ‘inspectors’ are often dubious, relying in an ignorance of the sublties of the law to get access to your home. Most of the people caught tend to be women at home with young children. Often the local newspapers collude with the shame factor by publishing lists of people prosecuted and fined.
As in most things to do with officialdom, they like to pick off the easy targets that do not have the knowledge or wit to fight back and question this intrusion into personal liberty and the application of these ambiguous laws.
This sort of stuff really annoys a lot of people. It is wrong in so many ways. Big brother, the exercise of power over the individual by the state. Quite fundamental isses relating to peoples basic rights under the law.
Here are a few of the ads:
It is has been going on for many years:
They try to persuade you that they have fleets of vehicles with high tech equipment that can detect whether you are watching in a TV in your home. Then, armed with this evidence the police arrive to supervise entry by inspectors.
However…people do fight back. Everyone has access to video recording equipment these days and the internet exposes the dubious laws which can be challenged:
There are many ways to collect taxes. This one is particularly stupid and devisive.
That would explain why I can no longer sneak peek British TV.
You can view BBC internet streams if your computer has an IP address that makes your computer appear as if you are based in the UK. There are various Firefox add-ons that do this for free and lots of ‘proxy’ services that, for a modest fee, provide a reliable service. This is a well worn path for knowledgeable ex-pats.
I watch BBC programmes in the UK, but only the recorded stuff, on the BBC Iplayer service, for which you do not need a license. I can’t abide regular broadcast TV, with all its interruptions (even the BBC keeps up a constant stream of ads for new programmes which can be really annoying.)
Someplace, somewhere they have got the balance right and a fair system for paying for well funded public service producing quality TV. It is not the UK with its license fee. It is not the US with its PBS begging bowl financing. The answer is out there.
Eh, we’ve had the licence guys round a few times; I just said I don’t have a TV, don’t watch live TV, and they said “OK, sorry to bother you”, and went away. It’s hardly a massive imposition.
I did have a friend who was prosecuted for it ages back, while in a shared student flat- he let the inspector in (or possibly just opened the door with the telly visible), believing his flatmate had paid the fee, when it turned out the guy had just pocketed the cash. It certainly made things awkward in the flat for a while, but I never heard of any terrible social shame from it.
My Grandpa just hid the telly in a cupboard, and told the inspector he had an aerial 'cos he didn’t want the whole street to know he couldn’t afford a television. I don’t think my Grandpa really got the whole concept of shame though 
Most of the people they catch are women on the breadline at home with young children sitting in front of the TV. Apparently using it is a cheap form of entertainment. When the inspector calls, it is quite straightforward, TV and no license means a summons and a fine. Not paying the fine means you risk jail.
It is an employment scheme for well known public service contractors like Capita. The court costs for the huge number of cases used to criminalise non-payers must be considerable.
I get about a threatening letter every few weeks from TV licensing. When a guy did catch me at home, I told him that I did not have a TV or a license and to stop sending me letters. They stopped for a couple of months and then started again. Apparently they want you to prove your id and send a signed form stating that you don’t have a TV. They want you to do this on a regular basis to verify that no TVs have crept into your household.
I regard the use criminal law and these bullying letters to be harrassment. I had to laugh at the way people use their own video cameras to confront these bullies.
Those who work for the BBC should be ashamed of this. But they persist in claiming that if they do not pursue people, they would lose significant amounts of revenue.
I see it costs 8.6% to collect the TV license and enforce it compared with around 1.5% typical for other taxes in the UK.
Despite its bullying tactics, the BBC is a lousy tax collector.
It gets $6billon from the license fees and $2.5 from selling programs and other sources (such as the UK government to cover the cost of the BBC World Service.)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/annualreport/2013/executive/finances/licence_fee.html
It should be possible to come up with a plan to finance this out of general taxation and ring fence it to preserve the budget from influence. The BBC could get far income from selling programs worldwide through video streams and downloads from its vast archive of material. The Internet is heading in that direction, carrying more and more video.
But that would require good leadership and clear vision of the future. These are not words often heard in the same sentence as the BBC.
How much money are we talking about?
How much does a television set license cost?
Every few weeks? How are you defining “few” here?
The letters can come surprisingly often if you’re in a rental house. At my old place we could get one a month. We mostly ignored them, occasionally filling in the online form, which would stop it for 6 months or so. It was almost 5 years before anyone came round, but they do like wasting paper.
I presume as a rental flat in a student area, they just assumed it’d be changing occupancy often, as we certainly never got that number of them at my parents’ house, which also had no TV.
It’s not really ideal, I’ll agree, but I have trouble getting too wound up about people getting fined, in truth- I was brought up without a telly, and I’m not seeing the great hardship in not having one- especially with the iPlayer situation. It’s unpleasant to not be able to afford luxuries, but that doesn’t mean you’re entitled to them free.