Non-payment of BBC licence fee accounts for 10% of prosecutions
The BBC is responsible for more than one in 10 criminal prosecutions. Culture Secretary Sajid Javid reports that 10% of magistrate court cases are for non-payment of the BBC licence fee. Non-payment is a criminal offence, punishable by a fine of up to £1,000. Every week about 3,000 people are fined for non-payment, and about one person a week is jailed for non-payment of the fine. Women make up about 70% of those prosecuted and convicted, and half of those jailed for not paying the fine. When people fail to pay other utilities, such as energy companies, they are guilty of a civil offence, not a criminal one, and they cannot be prosecuted and fined for falling behind with their payments. Civil action can be taken for recovery, but without fines and jail terms.
Several newspapers have had reporters visit magistrate's court to describe what goes on. They all tell harrowing stories of frightened, distressed people, mostly women, facing fines they cannot pay under threat of imprisonment if they do not. Many are single mothers, many on benefits. They have not paid the licence fee because they cannot afford to. The sum of £145.50 per year is huge for a young mother struggling to feed and clothe children. Many weep in court, unable to pay the fine for the same reason they couldn't afford the licence fee; they don't have the money.
Everyone with a TV, except the over 75s, has to pay, whether or not they watch BBC programmes. If people fail to pay for other services, such as a Sky subscription, for example, the service is withdrawn without them being taken to court and fined.
In 21st century Britain we should not be dragging helpless women through courts and fining them, or making their lives more wretched than they already are by putting them in jail for non-payment of those fines. It should be a civil, not a criminal offence, and should be dealt with by withdrawal of the service rather than by prosecution. The technology to do this is relatively simple.
The development of tiny transistor radios killed the radio licence in 1971. Now laptops, tablets and smartphones make the BBC licence fee increasingly difficult to sustain. Many watch TV on portable devices instead of TV sets. They watch programmes on Catch Up and iPlayer. Many do not watch BBC programmes at all. Clearly an alternative way of financing the BBC has to be found. That will take time, but before then non-payment of its licence should be a civil, not a criminal action, and we should stop letting the BBC hound helpless people through the courts.
Ending the BBC licence fee
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?