Deregulation Bill

Baroness Corston Excerpts

Thursday 5th February 2015 Lords Chamber

[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.

[Lord Berkeley of Knighton (CB)]

I am grateful to the noble Baroness for giving way. I have just one simple question. I do not think that this amendment is about decriminalisation, it is simply about timing and budgets. The Government have often said that business and arts institutions need to know what lies ahead in terms of budgeting. It may well be that decriminalisation should happen, but as I understand it, that is not what this amendment is about.

[Baroness Corston]

The amendment is about the fact that the status quo remains until the renewal of the charter in 2017. I am merely flagging up the point that we should not allow continuing criminalisation in respect of this penalty, because of the malign effect it has on, admittedly, a small number of people. As the noble Baroness, Lady Howe of Idlicote, said, the BBC itself confirmed in an article in the Guardian in September last year:

“Licence fee evasion is low”.

It is not low because people think they might go to prison, it is low because people believe in the BBC. I simply do not think that the signal that we are sending, that the status quo is all right, is acceptable.

[Lord Lipsey (Lab)]

My Lords, I support the amendment, despite the fact that I have considerable sympathy with the argument put by my noble friend Lady Corston. The status quo has persisted for a good long time. It will inevitably be re-examined on charter renewal—which I will come to in a minute—and it therefore seems to me that we can take a decision on whether decriminalising makes sense when we see whether it is relevant or not to that environment.

I sat on the Davies inquiry into the BBC licence fee in 1999 and, at the end of a year of study, probably knew as much about the licence fee as any man living. Unfortunately, like the man who once understood the Schleswig-Holstein question, I have long since forgotten all of it, save that the licence fee is a perfect way of funding the BBC but unfortunately is a poll tax that bears heavily on poor people. That core dilemma, if I can call it that, is something that we shall have to face up to when we come to charter renewal and to discuss BBC finance at the end of the current period.

At least four options are likely to be available: leave the licence fee as it is; what I guess the BBC will come down for, which is a slightly modernised licence fee, with people paying it for computers as well as televisions, which I am told are the same thing these days; a much greater modification to the licence fee; or some new form of finance. Those will be the broad options available when we come to charter renewal. This will be a very interesting argument.

I will just slip in something that I think would be very helpful at this stage. As part of the charter renewal process, it would be a very good move by the Government to set up an independent inquiry, such as the one I sat on with the noble Lord, Lord MacGregor, into the licence fee. In particular, it should produce a menu with prices to tell the public that if you want to pay this much licence fee, you can have these services, or if you want to pay that much licence fee, you can have those services and so on. At the moment, we are very much in the dark as to what that menu would be and what the choices would be, and an independent inquiry would greatly illuminate public debate.

To come to the kernel of this point, it does seem to me to be arse about tip—if I am allowed to use such an expression in this House—to take powers to change the basis on which the licence fee is collected long before deciding whether you want a licence fee at all, let alone what kind of licence fee you want. An inquiry into this is sitting, which will report. Then is the time for Parliament to take a view of its findings, together with the whole scenario for the funding of the BBC. Arse about tip is the only phrase I can think of for doing it right now.