Ending the BBC licence fee

Today, BBC Director-General Lord Hall will say that the corporation will back plans to scrap Britain's 1930s-style TV licensing fee. That's good. Unfortunately he wants to replace it with a broadcasting levy on every household – whether or not they own a television. That's bad. Indeed, it's crazy.

Why should households pay a levy to support broadcasters, even if they have no television? Or even if they have a television but rarely use it? It's a broadcasting poll tax, which will impose the biggest burden on the poorest households, like the one-parent families who, already, account for the bulk of the prosecutions for non-payment.

And what's the logic of it anyway? That we need broadcasters, and the licence fee is no longer a realistic way to pay for them? Firstly, you can question the extent to which we need broadcasters. Many of us live quite happily without needing daily doses of Call the Midwife, Death in Paradise, Casualty or for that matter Premier League football: why should we subsidise those who can't? Politicians might reckon that Question Time and Newsnight are essential 'public service broadcasting', but precious few of the rest of us would mourn their passing.

Broadcasters are by no means the only people to argue that they are producing a product essential to our lives or culture, but for which it is hard to get people to pay. Newspapers are saying exactly the same: they feed us news, analysis and opinion, but we are buying fewer and fewer of their dead-tree products, picking it all up free online instead. Should we have a levy on households so that Rupert Murdoch can continue to serve us up his vital product? No, definitely not. It is up to those industries to find market ways to charge for what they produce – through advertising, for example, or through subscription mechanisms.

The BBC should do the same. Technology is pretty nifty these days, in ways it wasn't when the BBC was created in the 1930s. For folk who pride themselves on their creativity, developing a subscription service, from which non-payers can be excluded, should not be too far beyond their wit. Or even using advertising and sponsorship, as so many other perfectly reputable broadcasters do.

If the BBC did not exist, we certainly would not invent it. Today it looks rather like a bloated fixed-line network monopoly in an age of mobile phones. A lumbering dinosaur in an age of fleet-footed niche producers. So why force households to keep subsidising this sad throwback?