I'm puzzled... in one breath you say we should have no more choice regarding paying the TV license as we do paying council tax... but in the very next paragraph, the license fee isn't part of public taxation... so which is it? Either it's a tax that has to be paid like any other, or it isn't a tax.
The easiest way of describing the Licence Fee is to quote Wikipedia, since its as pithy as it gets:
The TV licence fee is a tax collected by the BBC and primarily used to fund the radio, television and online services of the BBC itself. This type of tax (i.e. one raised for a particular defined purpose) is known as a hypothecated tax.
Although the money is raised for its own use, the BBC does not directly use the collected fees. The money received is first paid into the Government's Consolidated Fund. It is subsequently included in the 'vote' for the Department of Culture, Media and Sport in that year's Appropriation Act, and passed back to the BBC for the running of the BBC's own services (free from commercial advertisements). The money also finances programming for S4C and the BBC World Service as well as to run BBC Monitoring at Caversham.
Its actually very unusual for a tax to be hypothecated in the UK, but thats the way it works. Is it a tax, a fee, a subscription? Who cares? Apart from the relatively tiny number of people on the web who argue about such things, nobody else does. Its really a very British solution - in much the same way that Iplayer asks you if you have a licence, but all you have to say is 'yes', without really any means of checking that (at present).
With regards to the BBC being a public good, that is entirely open to opinion.
it is disingenuous to compare the BBC and the NHS. one is a necessity the other is totally superfluous.
There are a surprising number of people who argue that both the BBC and the NHS are not 'public goods' (a number of them within the present government), who would like both of them reduced to no more than a very basic service, with private providers, insurance etc instead. In fact both are public goods, they just do different things, and the public evidently admires both.
I'm certainly not going to enter into a political debate, if only because on every forum where people have tried to argue 'the BBC is biased', they just go Google mining and come up (either directly or indirectly) with some stuff from the Daily Mail, the Telegraph, or Guido Fawkes. Actual data, as opposed to an ideological viewpoint and confirmation bias, is generally lacking, and it just gets boring.
I remember reading the Guardian article at the time, but its important to read between the lines (the article is taking a snapshot, and of course you dont read about all the people who fessed up immediately) and put the article in context. You also have to see this as an article with a very particular point of view, which I would argue is actually aiming at the wrong target.
Firstly, as James Purnell pointed out, the actual numbers that end up in court are relatively low (if your guilty, you've probably paid the fee, the fine, etc and never gone near an actual court), and those that do are often for complex reasons. If you look at the questions being asked by people going to court ('do I need a TV licence if I have a B & W TV?'/'Why do I need to pay if I have Sky?'), they could have all been answered very easily by just looking at the TV licencing website, etc. So a certain level of basic ignorance about the law and an unwillingness to find out may be part of it.
The next thing is that often these people are poor, possibly really didn't understand English, in at least one case, illiterate, and perhaps with often chaotic lives (they quoted a man with mental health problems). The wiki quotes some research from 2002 on the profile of the areas where evasion was highest:
"Areas with high evasion rates are most likely to have, for example, a higher than average proportion of younger people, low income households, and students and single parent families, and a level of County Court judgments 50 per cent above the national average"
The percentage of County Court judgements is an indicator - its not that people are too poor to pay the licence fee, its that they are often too poor to pay any other utility as well. Add to that basic confusion/ignorance about how the system works (since 2013, I dont need to inform TV Licencing when putting a TV through the till, and I dont need to tell a customer that they need one either), and you can understand many of the problems.
However, this isn't an argument against the licence fee (because evasion is pretty much spread equally amoungst all social classes), its an argument against poverty and social exclusion. Its very interesting just how many Tory MP's and ministers, never mind certain parts of the press (The Mail, the Express, the Telegraph and of course The Sun/Times) are now deeply worried about the plight of the 'poorest in our society' when it comes to the Licence Fee, yet have been more than happy to vote/push for benefit cuts (the 'bedroom tax' was mentioned by someone in the article), sanctioning over petty infractions by those seeking work. Nick Clegg said yesterday that Osborne actually cut benefits because it would popular to certain voters who were 'very anti welfare (egged on by much of the press) - a horribly cynical move for the most base of political objectives
http://www.theguardian.com/politics...rne-cut-welfare-poorest-boost-tory-popularity
The real irony is that if you are unemployed, on benefits, etc, then the licence fee is in fact by far the best value your going to get in terms of information, education and entertainment. If the government wished to raise benefits to allow people to live more stable and less stressful lives (and pay that £3 a week) they could do so - they just dont want to.
If I stopped using electricity I would not be paying for it. If I were off grid and not using water or connected to sewage I would not be paying for it
And you can do that. Just use a PC, projector, etc. As long as you can't watch or record live programmes, thats fine.
I'm amazed that this topic has generated such a large response on a forum such as this; no judgement being made here, perfectly valid to discuss what is obviously important to many members. I had no idea that television was such an integral and important part of people's lives.
I share your amazement, but I'm not surprised - just look at the comments on any newspaper's website after an article about the BBC, and you'll see a similar outpouring. I suspect TV is a bit like the NHS and school. We've all used them at some point, and we all have an opinion.
TV isn't a key part of my life either, but when I want to watch something, I'd like to watch something good. And there is more good stuff on than I can catch up with, which is no bad thing. The reality is that we all watch TV, and we will all like slightly different things. As long as we all get to see some stuff we like, and reasonable cost and high quality (which most think we do), why worry about it.
