TV Licence Fee

Bill Grant Excerpts

Monday 20th November 2017 Westminster Hall

[Helen Jones]

The BBC’s natural history unit, which produces excellent documentaries, is based in Bristol. There has been investment in Birmingham and Belfast. As the hon. Member for Solihull (Julian Knight) said, there is a lot more to do. The BBC needs to do much more to reflect the diversity in this country.

[Bill Grant (Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock) (Con)]

I totally agree with virtually everything the hon. Lady is saying. It is good that we examine the licence fee, although it was examined fairly recently—the new royal charter was introduced in January this year. I hope she agrees that the World Service has been a lifeline to many people in many nations throughout the world. The education of our children over decades has been excellent and continues to be so. BBC Scotland is well respected north of the border—speaking of which, my trousers are a ferret-free zone. I value the input. It is right that we look at the way we pay for it and the value we get for 40p a day. In time to come, and as broadcasting changes, we will need to look at it.

[Helen Jones]

The hon. Gentleman is right; we need continually to scrutinise the BBC and what it offers.

The BBC needs to have much more programming coming from the regions and to do much more to increase the diversity of its staff. I am very pleased when the BBC tells me that its apprentices in engineering, media and production come overwhelmingly from families where the parents have not been to university, but there are only 230 of them. More needs to be done to ensure that its journalists, presenters and, most of all, its producers and commissioning editors reflect the diversity of this country, and to break the charmed circle where people go from Oxford and Cambridge to the BBC; and not because those are bad people, but because a national broadcaster has to reflect the different experiences, ways of looking at things and outlooks of people in the regions and nations of this country.

When the BBC says that it has reduced management costs, I am pleased to hear it, but we also know that it has a real problem with the gender pay gap, which needs to be addressed. Even more importantly, pay at the bottom of the BBC pyramid is often very low. People who want to move into broadcasting need to be able to do so without having to rely on families for support, so that they can make a career and so that people from different backgrounds can begin a career at the BBC.

Nevertheless, I still think that the licence fee presents value for money. Strides have been made in ensuring that more of it is collected. A National Audit Office report earlier this year showed that the amount of money collected had gone up and that complaints had halved since 2010, but let us be clear that it is still expensive to collect. That is why the hon. Member for Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock (Bill Grant) is right to say that we have to keep examining it and looking at alternatives.

Some £162 million was spent on collection in 2014, despite the fact that the licence fee remained static between 2010 and 2016. Evasion is running at between 6.2% and 7.2%. That costs the rest of us between £250 million and £290 million a year. Because of that, there are people who argue quite passionately that not paying the licence fee should be decriminalised. I thought long and hard about this before coming to the debate. I think, on balance, that I would not support that, because it is simply likely to increase evasion. Indeed, when David Perry QC reviewed this, he said that it

“carries the risk of an increase in evasion and would involve significant cost to the taxpayer and those who pay the licence fee.”

I do not want people who do pay their dues to be penalised because of those who do not. People who worry about the criminalisation of not paying the licence fee are often more worried about sentencing for it, which is a different issue. I do not—nor, I suspect, does anyone else—want to see very poor people jailed for not paying their licence fee.

--- Later in debate ---

[Alan Brown]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that intervention—I must say that I anticipated it. I actually watched some of the key set-piece debates that the BBC showed at my parents’ house, so it became a family gathering. [Hon. Members: “Ah!”] Yes—that helped to spark internal family debate while we watched the television. It took shouting at the television to a different level.

To conclude, I have highlighted many issues with the current TV licensing system and the operation of the BBC.

[Bill Grant]

My hon. Friend the Member for Dartford (Gareth Johnson) beat me to that intervention.

I do not recognise the concerns of the hon. Member for Kilmarnock and Loudoun (Alan Brown) about the BBC’s performance in Scotland. Having been a councillor for 10 years and in Parliament for a short period, I have never had a complaint about BBC Scotland, and I do not see it in the way that he does. The public seem to value and appreciate BBC Scotland and the BBC in general. It may be a political perspective that he is giving this afternoon, but it is certainly not a public one.

[Alan Brown]

I do not pretend to speak for the entire public. I am expressing a view, but it is one shared by many other people. It might be a political view, but politicians clearly have different views, and there are always two sides to an argument. I recall Ian Davidson calling “Newsnight Scotland” “Newsnat” and having a pop at the then presenters. It could perhaps be said that when the BBC annoys those on both sides of an argument, it is doing its job. I am not saying that the entire public share my view, but it is shared by many people who have the same kind of political allegiances.