Deregulation Bill
Debate between Baroness Howe of Idlicote and Baroness Corston
Baroness Howe of Idlicote (CB)
My Lords, our amendment to Clause 64 seeks reassurance that any potential changes to the licence fee enforcement system will not take effect until at least 1 April 2017. This necessary amendment ensures that any impact on the BBC’s income from the licence fee is thoroughly considered before any action is taken.
The reason why 1 April 2017 is vitally important is because this is when the current licence fee settlement expires. Under the current settlement, the BBC has been able to plan its programme-making years in advance and to budget accordingly. Thus any changes to the licence fee enforcement regime coming into effect before 1 April 2017 would have a significant impact on the service and content that the BBC provides. The BBC needs sufficient time to respond to a change in income or else drastic action, such as service closures or the loss of programmes, could be a serious possibility.
Our amendment ensures financial stability for the BBC so that it can continue long-term commitments. From 2014 until 2018, the BBC is marking the First World War centenary with its biggest and most ambitious pan-BBC season ever undertaken. Unique in scale and breadth, and across BBC TV, radio, online and international, national and local services, this commitment is possible only because of licence fee funding and an assurance of income. “Frozen Planet”, “Africa” and “Planet Earth” are all examples of the brilliant factual programmes produced by the BBC’s natural history unit, all of which took four years to make. Quality dramas such as “Wolf Hall” and the upcoming “War and Peace”, also typically take around four years to produce. There is also the current “Taking Liberties—The Democracy Season”—years in the making—marking the anniversaries of the first Parliament and Magna Carta. It is seasons and programmes such as these which highlight graphically why the timing of any potential change is crucial.
The Government made a commitment to the BBC when the current licence fee settlement was signed in 2010,
“to provide a full financial settlement to the end of the year 2016/17, with no new financial requirements or fresh obligations of any kind being placed on the BBC and/or licence fee revenues in this period”.
Our amendment to Clause 64 safeguards this undertaking. As I have already said, the BBC has carried out forward planning under this commitment. Clause 64 will enable the government of the day to act upon the conclusion of the licence fee enforcement review currently being conducted by David Perry QC and due to report in June 2015. The BBC, I know, looks forward to engaging with the review. Its overriding concern will be to ensure a licence fee enforcement system that is both proportionate and successful in maintaining the current low levels of evasion and collection costs. Currently, the licence fee evasion rate is low, at around 5.5%. If licence fee enforcement were purely a civil matter and the evasion rate were to increase to that of utility bills, which is just under 10%, that would cost the BBC around £20 million per annum.
The conclusions of the review by David Perry QC of licence fee enforcement should be considered in the round as part of the upcoming charter review. This is a common-sense approach which would consider the interests of all those who would be affected and of course would include licence fee payers. Our amendment, which I should have said at the beginning has strong cross-party support, provides certainty for the BBC’s budgets and planning until the next funding settlement begins in April 2017.
The BBC is a vitally important, well-loved national institution and, as often referred to in this House and the other place, is the envy of countries around the world for its trusted and independent news output and the quality drama and children’s programming it produces. Why risk losing that or damaging our much-loved programmes and services? I hope that noble Lords will agree. I beg to move.
Baroness Corston (Lab)
My Lords, I rise with reluctance to oppose the amendment moved by the noble Baroness, Lady Howe of Idlicote. I yield to no one in my support of the British Broadcasting Corporation. We are extraordinarily fortunate to have such an institution in this country. One has only to go to the United States of America to see television where there are hundreds of channels but nothing to watch to know how lucky we are to have the BBC. However, I take issue with the criminalisation of a failure to pay the fee.
Whenever I meet women in prison who are there because they did not pay the fine, I get a message from TV Licensing, which is based in Bristol where my old constituency was, saying, “Oh well, not paying the television licence fee is not a crime”. Of course it is not. What happens is that these people, usually poor women, are taken to court where they plead guilty. Some have said to me, “I left the television on because the kids said that the other children at school were talking about programmes they did not know about”, but they could not afford the £145.50 a year it costs to pay for the licence. If it was a civil penalty, of course there would be a fine, and other things like distraint can be used against those who do not pay a fine arising from a civil penalty.
I know that 50 people a year are imprisoned because they do not pay the television licence fee. They are not imprisoned if they do not pay their council tax, but local authorities seem to survive. I once met a woman who had been imprisoned for three months for failing to pay the £145.50 television licence fee and a £200 fine. If she could not afford the licence fee, surely she was not going to be able to afford a £200 fine as well. During those three months in prison she lost her tenancy and was unable to look after her children, who were taken into care. When she came out of prison, she was told that she could not have local authority accommodation for a family because she did not have her children with her, and when she went to social services she was told that she could not have her children back because she did not have family accommodation. That is a Catch-22.