Although the government is to increase the TV licence fee from £131.50 to £151.50 by 2012 the British Broadcasting Corp. is complaining that it will be £2bn short of the money it needs. Director-General Mark Thompson has claimed that it will be unable to improve the poor quality of its programmes without this money.
The increases in the fee that TV viewers are expected to pay for permission to watch television will be lower than the expected increases in the retail price index. This may mean a reduction in income in real terms.
Critics of the media giant hope that this is the beginning of the end the BBC’s extortion, currently running at £3bn annually. To collect the money the Corporation monitors every household and business, and threatens that is investigators will “interview under caution” anyone who has not bought a licence. Businesses selling TV receivers and companies providing cable or satellite TV must report the names and addresses of their customers to the BBC.
“Welcome to the real world” said the Financial Times when the settlement was announced. The newspaper argued that licence fee funding could not be justified after 2012. It also believed that the government would be “highly nervous” about creating “television licence martyrs” by enforcing the licence on people watching TV on personal computers. An increasing number of people are already realising that in fact the BBC has great difficulty taking legal action against viewers who refuse to buy a licence