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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » The big problem with free TV licences for those 75+ is that
politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » The big problem with free TV licences for those 75+ is that staggering one in six of all UK households qualify
From 1980-84 a big part my then job at the BBC was to deal with the PR and political issues relating to the corporation’s prime income source, the TV licence. None of the challenges that was as sensitive or as problematic as what should be done about the oldies who were required to pay the same fee as everybody else.
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If the general public do conclude Hague and his fellow sceptics were right about the Euro they'll probably give their views on the coming Euro referendum a bit more weight, simply because they were right before, though they'll need to avoid sounding triumphalist.
Also, any statements by leading Europhile UK politicians in the 90s about how great the Euro would be, and how the UK ought to be in it, can be dug up and thrown at the pro-Europe side today.
In fact, every household should be encouraged to "borrow a crumbly" - get them on the electoral roll at their house, even if they still live in a residential home, to qualify for a free TV licence. As payback for all those martyrs who had their licence fee "secretly" paid....
Please correct me if I am wrong here, but is the TV licence not the most regressive tax imposed in the UK today? Students and UB40s pay not the same rate but the same amount as the very richest.
With regard to the politics, burden shifting from the Treasury to the BBC itself effectively removes a subsidy from the BBC which no-one cares about while saving taxpayers a chunk of money. As Mike says it also allows decisions taken in the future on the subject not to affect the govt of the day politically.
With all the talk of big rabbits coming out of small hats, I wonder if part of the strategy will to abolish certain government departments altogether. Closing DCMS for example would have Polly and the luvvies screaming, but the general population are probably now of the opinion that the arts have enough interested wealthy benefactors at a time when the public are to be subjected to serious cuts in services. Other big rabbits might be the combining of Income Tax and NI which was mooted before, a serious cut in Employer NI to facilitate minimum wage rises and some way of counting part of the protected Overseas Aid budget towards the 2% military spending target. Oh, and the 40% rate to 50k all in one go, please George.
PS Do any bookies have Budget Bingo up yet? I'm abroad and can't get to most of their websites.
‘This is pure politics.’ – And rather clever, the BBC Director General appears very happy with the deal, as does the Government – The poor old Guardian however, appears to have been driven to apoplexy by the idea. – Oh well, never mind.
I'm expecting something which will save 5 or 10bn be announced without immediate mention of the number.
For me, the most egregious aspect of the current funding system is the criminal penalties imposed almost exclusively on the poor for not having the licence. These run at nearly 200,000 a year so there are plenty of current martyrs to replace those of the 1980s.
Astonishingly this is about 1 in 10 of all criminal prosecutions in this country. The amount of public money spent on this is intolerable as is the absurdity of criminalising so many of our fellow citizens. Including the time wasted in investigating such crimes, processing them through our court system and then the subsequent means courts when the fines are not paid resulting in time in prison in lieu the cost must run into the low billions. It has to stop.
When it does the BBC will need a different funding model. With the ridiculously expensive switch to digital that should not be impossible but we are in the final days of a supposedly "free to air" service that costs us all a fortune.
I think he will be thinking about Howe's budget of 1981 and Lawson's of 1984. He will want to set his mark on history and change the political weather. The track record of Chancellors who seek to do this is, at best, somewhat mixed but I do think he will make the attempt.
We will see an agenda which will dominate the rest of this Parliament; that will change the size and nature of the State over a number of years rolling back many of the accretions that occurred under Brown. I have previously commented that it will be eye wateringly tight with, I predict, an accelerated program to eliminate the deficit and start token debt repayment.
That means there will be very little scope for a reduction in the tax burden overall but that does not mean that individual taxes cannot be cut. One possibility has to be excluding family homes of up to £1m from Inheritance tax. But such monies as are available will probably be used to further increase the IT threshold to something like the living wage outside London.
We will have welfare cuts of at least £12bn but I predict that they will be only a part of a larger packet of cuts. If he is to avoid these welfare cuts dominating the headlines outside the Guardian he will need to do something dramatic. My prediction is a significant rise in the NMW.
Osborne has shown comparatively little interest to date in tax simplification. In fact, for understandable reasons, he has been much more focussed on aggressively closing tax loopholes by means of the GAAR, disclosure agreements with foreign countries and now, of course the Google tax on multinationals. I expect more details on that today as well.
The integration of IT and NI has been hinted at in previous budgets but there has been very little of the wide consultation that such a step would require. There may be a repeat of the aspiration but I would be surprised if there is much progress on this today.
For those who will be playing Budget bingo I think the Northern Powerhouse will get more than a mention with a kick start to the infrastructure that is needed to make that any kind of reality.
I cannot see the Licence fee lasting much longer. There are so many other ways to access content now. There is not enough advertising revenue to go around so some sort of subscription model is probably needed. It is a pity because for all its faults I love the BBC and hardly watch other broadcasters apart from Channel 4. When away from the UK I miss the intelligence of Radio 4, the specialist music of Radio 6, the Leicester City away games on Radio Leicester, the documentaries on BBC 4 etc etc.
All you need to know.
All you need to know.
Mind you the terrorists might ( in the interests of impartiality of course)
Once again the Tories are going to chuck out the baby with the bathwater.
The only thing that would do it is a move to a national household tax (i.e. making the licence fee compulsory), which would be a very hot political potato. It is a shame they did not plan for a subscription service during the digital switchover and ensure that all new STBs had a smartcard slot ...
The BBC faces more competition all the time, and is very slow to change. Which is odd as they have some brilliant technical bods in it.
All it takes is one campaigner locally and it catches on like wildfire. Especially amongst those who wouldn't pay for one given half a chance. Happy customers don't act like this. And the idea that putting the TVLF up to compensate for Over 75s getting freebies is just laughable. When you've a declining product that's losing market share - you don't put the price up.
The BBC and their debt collections have lost the Big Brother fear they had with the supposed Detector Vans of the 70/80s. A ludicrous idea, but very effective monster under the bed enforcement monster.
What won't happen: PB Tories blame LibDem cabinet ministers for budget leaks.
What will happen: George gives full rein to his "son of Brown" tendencies to run the whole government from HMT, so expect decisions on what ought normally to be other departments' policy remits.
What might happen: another omnishambles. Osborne sometimes has a tin ear when it comes to traditional Conservative supporters. Remember the last omnishambles was due to the aggregation of a number of apparently reasonable measures to get rid of anomalies (and which Damien McBride said had all previously been considered and rejected by Gordon Brown).
I went from being the BBC's Greatest Fan. Really. R4 was my default. Working with the org was my dream come true. But then it all fell away from about 2001 and very quickly too. When they tried to be the Official Opposition over Iraq I was truly appalled.
I see maybe four progs a week on BBC4 or BBC2 combined. Nothing else. For radio I go to LBC.
All my viewing is More4, C5, ITV various channels and satellite ones full of US content. I deliberately looked at BBC1 EPG yesterday and there wasn't a single programme in 7 days I would tune into. Not one. I don't use their website, nor watch their news. For that I go to Sky or any of the other newspaper websites.
Is that a wise use of licence payers money?
On a personal level, if I stay alive and remain a top rate taxpayer I expect to be much better off in 2020 than I am now. So it's not all bad news :-)
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-07-08/china-s-market-rescue-makes-matters-worse-as-prices-lose-meaning
While I don't think your average joe loves the BBC as much as your average Guardianista, I don't think they hate it as much as Tories do, or see it as this evil monolith thing.
That's a fairly ridiculous statement.
No one else does it. No one else can do it because its not commercial and other organisations don't have the technical know how. Some wrestle to get a responsive website out in one language let alone 27.
I really can't see the Mail or Guardian figuring out or prioritising how to get a Burmese font to render on a cheap Mokia. If the BBC was purely commercial, I fear the same thing would happen.
www.bbc.com/burmese
Ditto FreeSat.
In exchange for taking over the over 75s liability it should have asked HMG that more key sports should be free-to-air. If not, it just shows its lack of commercial awareness.
The Guardian is probably moaning because the BBC will have to cut back on its subscriptions - or does it get them free in exchange for being the premier newspaper used?
What they, local radio, local news suppliers object to is BBC recipes et al - it's crushing the whole marketplace using monies gained by menaces. Ditto all the magazines using related content/expertise.
When I was at BT - we were completely restricted from cross-subsidised products. Broadband prices had to include everything - not just the cost of the BBand bit. If the BBC had to follow similar rules - it would be stuffed.
When you've got 70 odd years of archives and tech and know-how all paid for by a tax - you've got an enormous commercial advantage everyone else had to pay for. The *barrier to entry* is massive and unfair.
The point is the endless bureaucracy and layers of well paid management, the channels of mindless guff for the mass market that could be produced by anyone, the dominance and expansion that threatens existing provision of certain services such as local radio and commercial websites.
There is a place for public service broadcasting - for documentary and investigative journalism, for the World Service and multilingual news websites etc. This bit can be achieved for a small fraction of the cost of the existing BBC, without the regressive tax that literally puts poor people in prison for not paying it.
Edit: In any other circumstance such a regressive tax would be the subject of endless campaigning by the Guardianistas.
Is the plan to have the BBC spend the Budget day talking about the BBC instead of what's in the big red box..?
I have a TV licence yet half the time have no access to their content online because I happen to work abroad.
* If it didn't exist now, would we create it?
* If we did, would we expect everyone under 75 to pay it?
* Would it be a criminal offence not to pay it, even if you don't watch the BBC?
* Would we only give the money to the BBC?
* Would the BBC be able to use it for services and programmes that fell outside news gathering/reporting and public service broadcasting such as factual or childrens programming?
* Would it be acceptable to pay hundreds of staff more than the Prime Minister?
The BBC will be under OfCom shortly - a very good thing IMO.
It's counterproductive with me, makes me defensive.
That said, I only really watch the news and hignfy on the BBC these days, usually online, sometimes question time or other political stuff I guess, but despite leaning lefty I do think the BBC makes an effort, and I cannot stand overtly partisan media like the mail or the mirror and would hope none of our broadcasters end up like that, I'd be happy to fund a top quality world spanning public broadcaster, but it could be a lot cheaper, cutting back on a lot .
If it isn't sport or American TV, which is several orders of magnitude better than British TV not to mention more plentiful, I'm not as directly affected though, so the gif can probably get away a lot more re the BBC.
Just leave the BBC website alone though, I need that.
Speaking of the BBC, stumbled across most of a documentary (missed the start) about the Hittites on BBC4 last night, which was really rather interesting.
To go truly global would require BBC one etc to be commissioned globally from the get go. Maybe that should happen, but its not cheap or trivial to do.
I thought the lost Egyptian city was a good one. That was 2/3 I think. Explorers were looking for it on the wrong branch of the Nile, and the residents moved it too! Little blighters.
That's straight out of Googles blue-sky money pit thinking. TVLF shouldn't be wasted on that. Ever.
F1: as well as Raikkonen, Button's place may be under threat (although it's Maybe rather than the Probably of the Finn's departure): http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/formula1/33437682
On your first point, it seems everyone including the BBC feel the licence fee will not last much longer . This measure feels like a short term thing as Osborne doesn't want to deal with the hassle of doing so right now is all.
It is far from a given deal, and the BBC will need political capital to do it, which they are very short of.
I guess you would have preferred Panorama not to have exposed corruption in Fifa, which if I recall really annoyed Cameron at the time.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/13/bbc-labour-election
All sides believe the BBC is biased against them.
Think it's worth saying there's a general lacklustre approach to political journalism. Topics are treated superficially and dumbed down, interviews are used to try and trap politicians and claim scalps, and there's no real effort to actually explain even the most simple and important subjects (the difference between debt and deficit).
" I do think the BBC makes an effort .. "
It makes a determined effort to be neutral with most things but there seem to be red lines.
Global warming is always correct and must be supported, diversity is any form is sacrosanct and the EU is an institution made in heaven. Once you accept these exceptions, the BBC does its job.
John Inverdale still hasn't read the script. During the Serena Williams quarter final, he pointed out that Centre Court was only one third full. Cue an embarrassed silence from his female co-commentator. I think his days are numbered.
I don't particularly like tennis and women's tennis bores me, but I will watch the prettier ones. My chances of a job with the BBC are slightly less than nil.
How many of them would believe the fact that cash public spending went up every year of the last Parliament, for example?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/ed-miliband/11338695/Ed-Miliband-said-he-wanted-to-weaponise-NHS-in-secret-meeting-with-BBC-executives.html
Well.. "if we win the election" CF J Naughtie esq is hardly balanced is it... people have long memories.
Pretty much all The BBC's output on austerity has been to show how cuts affect people negatively.
Have they done any programmes on how people are now in work contributing to the economy.. If they have please tell me, I cant recall any programmes of that ilk and even if there have been, did they get the same prominence as those nasty Tories type programmes we have seen in the last 5 yrs.
With the right guide - you'll learn so much. Ours was superbly entertaining and very knowledgeable. He'd knock the socks off most docu presenters.
From memory the response could be reduced down to 7 letters including 3 f's