The injustice of the TV Licence

We promised more from David Grahams ASI report on the Licence Fee. The following passage is quoted verbatim. Eat your hearts out all you unreconstructed capitalists, no one delights in grinding the faces of the working poor quite as efficiently as TV Licensing.

Nor do most people see the darker side of the payment process. The Licence Fee is chargeable to any household that receives a live broadcast, whether that is a BBC signal or not. Failure to pay results in prosecution. In 2008/09 there were 168,000 prosecutions for evasion, nearly 15% of all prosecutions. Most of those charged are poor, often young single mothers. The only way you can avoid this payment is by watching no live TV, literally having your set disabled.

Here is a magistrate giving her own views of this system: "As a JP, I have for 20 years had the difficult task of sentencing TV licence defaulters, followed some months later by the often hopeless task of fine enforcement. Unlike other offenders, TV licence evaders are predominantly female, many of them benefit recipients with children. The majority are single, struggling to keep their families financially afloat. Food and electricity tokens often take priority over a weekly TV licence payment. If still without a licence, offenders can be re-prosecuted almost immediately unless they dispose of their TVs."

The fact that the Licence Fee criminalises poor people has been the main ground of dissent from public figures like Charles Moore, or Geoff Mulgan, a former advisor to the Labour Government, who said: "The Licence Fee alone stands as an inegalitarian flat-rate charge, linked in no way to ability to pay. (It is a tax) which has no democratic component: it lends no choices to those who pay and conveys no information to the broadcaster".