TV Licence Fee
Debate between Helen Jones and Brendan O'Hara(7 years ago)
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Helen Jones
The hon. Gentleman makes an interesting point, but it would be an argument for never prosecuting anyone for anything, because everything uses up court time. I am not sure that it is a real argument. I am much more convinced by the costs that people who do pay would incur if evasion went up. That already costs people quite a lot of money.
The fundamental question in all this is whether we believe in public service broadcasting. I do. I think it is a public good, and we finance many things because they are a public good. Some people do not want to pay for them. I remember a gentleman who told me during the election campaign that he did not see why he should pay taxes for the education system, because he did not have any children. “They pay your pension,” is the answer to that one. We get such comments all the time.
I think that we get a good service from the BBC. We think that our television is terrible, until we go abroad and look at what is provided there. We do not realise how good the BBC camera operatives are, until we try to watch rugby or football from somewhere else, where they are not as good, and we miss the goals because they are up at the other end of the pitch. We think that BBC News has its problems, until we are trapped somewhere where the only English language service available is CNN, which seems to be designed for people with the attention span of a gnat.
Helen Jones
Gnat with a g, in case the hon. Gentleman thinks I am insulting him.
We are not good at celebrating our successes in this country, but the BBC is a great success and we ought to celebrate it. Who else would have thought that televising Dickens as a serial, as it was originally done, was a good idea? Would any commercial broadcaster have thought of reviving a clapped-out old science fiction programme in which someone travels around in a ship disguised as a police box? But “Doctor Who” earns hundreds of millions of pounds around the world now. Would a commercial broadcaster ever have taken up a proposal for a serial about two old-age pensioners who meet after many years apart and who have dysfunctional families, or got actors of the calibre of Derek Jacobi and Anne Reid to play them? Then we would not have had the brilliantly named “Last Tango in Halifax”. I doubt very much that a commercial broadcaster would have taken up a proposal for a serial about a woman police sergeant in Yorkshire who looks after her grandson, or one where people said, “Oh yes, we’re going to cast Sean Bean as a Catholic priest in this.” If the BBC had not done so, we would never have had the brilliant “Happy Valley”, which has some of the best parts for women that I have ever seen, or “Broken”, which had some of the best acting that I have seen this year.
If that sounds like a recital of my favourite programmes, it is. Other people will have other favourites, but that is the beauty of a public service broadcaster: the wide range of programmes that it produces, whether they are brilliant nature documentaries, great dramas or good news broadcasts. There are also some turkeys, as we all know, but that is the price we pay for trying to bring in new programmes. We get successes and we get failures, but what we do not get is people constantly following the pattern of what went before. I therefore think that we ought to celebrate our public service broadcasting. We ought to ensure that it continues and, because of that, it has to be paid for.
Nothing comes for free in this life. If we do not pay for the BBC through the licence fee, we have to find another way of paying for it, but we should be clear that the BBC as it exists today, across radio and TV and online, is a success and that, by and large, we get very good value for our licence fee. It is interesting to see what the petitioners have said, but my view is that we should keep the licence fee and keep the model that has been so successful for us.