[cma-l] 'BBC licence fee'

Mon Feb 17 12:02:38 GMT 2014

It was never estabilshed as "The BBC Licence Fee".

As I recall, it was put in place as the mandatory  "Licence to Operate a Radio (later Television) Receiver" under the Wireless Telegraphy Act 1949.

The offence was always "to operate" and the defence was that "operating" had to be proved.

Date: Mon, 17 Feb 2014 11:33:26 +0000
From: p.lewis at londonmet.ac.uk
To: marilyn at northernvisions.org
CC: cma-l at commedia.org.uk
Subject: Re: [cma-l] The Guardian 14/02/14 - Ofcom boss: 'BBC licence fee should be shared with other broadcasters'

Over three decades ago, COMCOM,  predecessor of the CRA/CMA, wrote in its Comments on the Annan Report, "the licence fee revenue should ... cease to be the exclusive property of the BBC. It is not their's by divine right" (quoted in my chapter in Janey Gordon's Community Radio in the Twenty-First Century). Of course, at the time, this was regarded as outrageous nonsense. 

Peter Lewis

On 16 February 2014 11:24, Marilyn Hyndman <marilyn at northernvisions.org> wrote:

Press statement from the sector? 

On 14 Feb 2014, at 18:38, CMA-L wrote:

The BBC licence fee should be shared with other broadcasters to promote "competition, dynamism and innovation", according to the outgoing chair of media regulator Ofcom. 
Colette Bowe said she thought some BBC licence fee funding should be "contestable", with other media companies allowed to bid to make public service broadcasting programming.

"I am an economist. There is a lot to be said for contestable funding on competition grounds ... The counter argument is that once you start stripping away great chunks of funding you weaken the stability [of the BBC]," Bowe said on Thursday night, at a Royal Television Society all party parliamentary group dinner marking her departure from Ofcom after five years as chair.

"I have got sympathy with the idea that some more of the funding currently available for public service broadcasting should be contestable. Because on the whole I am on the side of the people in the sector who believe that what we need is even more competition and dynamism and innovation than we have got."

Bowe added that examples such as the Labour government's abandoned plan to use licence fee money to fund local news showed that it was "very, very difficult to see a way to make [contestable] work" in practice, but this "doesn't mean there is not a good reason to do it".

"I think the challenge for the BBC, leaving aside political will to continue with a hypothecated tax, the challenge is going to be enforcing the payment for the licence fee," she said, in the face of technological changes.

Bowe served as an Ofcom board member for several years before taking over as the media regulator's chair in 2009.

She is stepping down on 31 March, to be replaced by Dame Patricia Hodgson, the former BBC policy director and trustee who is Ofcom deputy chair.
Maggie Brown, Friday 14 February 2014 17.50 GMT

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/feb/14/ofcom-bbc-licence-fee-shared-other-broadcasters

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