Plea for war veterans over BBC’S means-testing of licence fees

THE BBC is facing a fierce backlash over its plan to means-test licence fees for the over-75s, with the defence minister claiming it will affect a million war veterans and Tory leadership candidates saying they will not let it stand.

From June next year, free licences will be available only to those who receive Pension Credit, meaning around 3million pensioners will have to start paying £154.50 for a colour licence.

A petition drawn up by Age UK demanding pensioners continue to have free licences had by last night attracted more than 175,000 signatures.

Tobias Ellwood, the defence minister who went to France with D-day veterans last week, said: “They fought on Gold Beach and right across Normandy 75 years ago to free continental Europe from the tyranny of Nazism. And to think that now, a week later, these people will be facing those bills… I do hope that we can reconsider this.” Mr Ellwood added that the BBC was a “commercialised enterprise” and must look at ways of funding the concession, which will cost the corporation about £745million a year.

When the issue was raised on Good Morning Britain on ITV yesterday, veterans and their families got in touch to voice their dismay, many saying that they were housebound and that the television was their main companion.

The Age UK petition called for the Government to take back responsibility for the free licences. It stated: “This is really the Government’s doing: they pushed the scheme on to the BBC without asking any of us what we think or providing the funding to sustain it.”

A campaign spokesman for Jeremy Hunt, the Foreign Secretary who is in the running for the Tory leadership, said the BBC’S decision was “a blow to millions of deserving pensioners” and he would make it a priority to “sit down with the BBC to find out how we can ensure we deliver on the Conservative manifesto promise to protect the licence fee support for older people”.

Esther Mcvey, a leadership contest rival, pledged to decriminalise nonpayment of the fee: “You shouldn’t need the weight of the criminal law to force people to pay the licence fee, especially those the BBC had promised to pay it for in the first place.”

Andrea Leadsom, Leader of the House, called the move “unacceptable”, adding: “It’s a commitment in the Conservatives’ manifesto [to protect free licences] and we have to reverse that.”