Re: Am I the only person...
I have done work for both BBC, and Sky but not for a couple of *years.*
I don't currently have *any* business interests with *either* party, I do have *mates* at *both* places. It's been long enough that I didn't think it was relevant, fair cop.
I don't teach maths, for which we may both be grateful, but even at £1 a day, I still think a machine which takes in unskilled people and turns them into taxpayers is worth having.
As to the basic point, regressive and unfair are the charges levied at the funding model.
I don't really have a good argument to defend one funding model over another, as you may have noticed, I am not a mathematical sophisticate ;)
*So if you define “fairness” as a) paying proportionate to your income, and b) paying for what you use, then on both counts, the TV Licence is less “fair” than the Poll Tax.*
I think of the BBC as a big school.
I paid a "unfair" proportion of my income which increased as my usage of schools declined, seems to be the argument. We do all use the BBC, just like we all use schools. Doesn't really matter if we don't watch it/dont attend school much.
The proportionate to income is a red-herring VAT is 20% on stuff, it's not 15% if you have less cash this week. Why should paying for thing X be "fair" when life more generally is not? if a more fair society is the goal, why changing the way people pay for a TV license, rather than something more weighty (minimum income for all people perhaps)
*What Whittingdale did say was the £145.50 was archaic and “unsustainable” in the long-run because viewing habits have changed.*
Well, as I've said, I think he's right, getting such good value for money from the public purse is "archaic" and "unsustainable". £145.50 buys the public the sort of efficiencies of scale that means business must compete with, long term, real quality. The BBC put out IPlayer, that meant the UK freelance market suddenly got an injection of highly skilled people in the field of video streaming.
This didn't raise the license fee but, did result in quite a bit of "knowledge capital" going back into the public pool, money changed hands and so that £145.50 has a some knock on "value" effects, but basically it's very good value for money, and he's right, that really is "archaic".
It's actually a fairly "poor" payer compared to market rate, frankly you don't work there purely for the money, from a hard headed business perspective, if a steady stream of people are prepared to give the nation a discount on market rates, that saves us all some serious money, which really is "unsustainable".
*Nor is adding BBC funding to income tax very popular, even though it addresses one half of the “fairness test” quite satisfactorily.*
Personally, I'd just put the license fee up to cover the non-payers, and not worry about chasing them that don't want to pay it, it's likely cheaper then the cost of enforcement. It has the added value that it requires very little cost to implement. The richer people would pay it, making it a quid a day would cover the non-payers.
Thankfully you already crunched the exact numbers These are sums anyone can do. If 20 per cent of today's payers stopped paying altogether, 40 per cent paid more (double today's fee, or £5.59 per week) and 20 per cent paid treble (or £8.39 per week) then the BBC's income from UK residents would exceed £5bn a year, compared with the £3bn it raises through the current system.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/02/26/dont_pay_bbc_no_dr_who_uk_mp/?page=2
Having a TV doesn't require a license and you don't have pay the BBC anything to benefit from it's output.
given I think that the way we use the BBC should be viewed as a long term move like having schools, having a state broadcaster is basically a better population of workers / knowledge cross-pollination.
It's a massive export, they do lots of stuff which results in the country earning a nice few quid, okay it's arcane and frankly weird.
But I think it's sound for us to pay for it in the way we do, basically on the grounds of it basically makes money in the long run, it actually employes lots of people, and 40p a day is small beer compared to the $waste_of_public_money generally found in our large public institutions.
Conditional Access is basically a giant money spinner for the vendors of C/A systems and a pain for everyone else, the license fee works, leave alone, but don't infest normal TV with cards/accounts/subscriptions. Everybody gets TV, everybody can plug in a TV, everyone knows exactly how much a license costs. It's a model of universal coverage and relatively efficent tax collection, which is free at point of use and transparent as to price. I as a layman know virtually no exact cost for the services I contribute to, health education, etc, but I know how much the licence fee is.
Why change that?
There are lots of things about the specifics of the way people pay for services which seem unfair, but that
I also don't really think fairness when it comes to a way of paying for stuff is a concern.
We basically live in a country where things have a price, if you don't want to pay the price, you don't have to have the service, now that is harsh but the way of things.
I don't need a TV but I do need childcare to work, I can't do anything about that cost other than pay it or do without childcare, I can't pay my rent without working, so I need childcare. When he's got something to say about that, perhaps, I'll take him seriously.