Free TV Licences: Over-75s Debate
Full Debate: Read Full DebatePeter Heaton-Jones
Main Page: Peter Heaton-Jones (Conservative - North Devon)Department Debates - View all Peter Heaton-Jones's debates with the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport
(5 years, 2 months ago)
Commons ChamberWell, I do not know whether that is a way to deal with the whole issue, as the hon. Gentleman suggests, but he is right to point out that since the licence fee settlement, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office has announced direct funding, in fact, of £255 million over three years to support language services for the World Service. He is right to point out that other streams of income are involved, but of course, we are talking about very much larger sums than that over a prolonged period in connection with this concession.
I worked for the BBC on and off for 20 years and it is an organisation that I love. I am not now and will never be a Tory Beeb basher, but on this, it has got it wrong. The BBC gets a guaranteed income from licence fee payers of £4 billion a year in a deal that the BBC was eager and enthusiastic to accept, because that gave it a guaranteed cash income that commercial organisations can only dream of. And now the BBC tells us that it cannot afford to continue this concession. Will my right hon. and learned Friend work with the BBC to ask it to live within its means, stop scaremongering about cuts, be more accountable in the way it spends our money and reverse this decision?
I shall certainly continue to engage with the BBC and to continue to ask it to live within its means and provide the services that my hon. Friend and I both want to see it provide to a very high standard. As he will recognise, this decision is one that we have already transferred to the BBC. It is the BBC’s decision to make, but I do not believe that this is the end of the conversation about what more the BBC can do to assist the older people we are all particularly concerned about.