The licence is a cumbersome tax, so we should fund the BBC centrally
SIR – The system of television licensing is an inefficient revenue collection method, and so are proposals for a household or even an individual levy.
The licence fee is a tax by any test. Just like tax, non-payment is subject to criminal sanctions as opposed to civil debt proceedings.
Let us face the facts and fund the BBC via general taxation. The whole issue of means-testing then falls away, the clogging of magistrates’ courts with pointless cases for non-payment disappears and the incremental costs of collection fall to zero.
The benefits include dispensing with the costs of the TV Licensing authority, removing irritation to nonTV owners of pointless letters, and the abolition of a whole category of jobsworths.
Total costs to the taxpayer will fall and there could be more money available for the BBC to fund those programmes that commercial broadcasters won’t make.
J N Sparks
Stinchcombe, Gloucestershire SIR – I was delighted to see your prominent report (July 15) of the letter by artists (many of whom I have worked with) in defence of the BBC.
I joined the BBC as a call boy in the Fifties and after some years became a freelance director, often returning. One had artistic disagreements with management but these were tempered by the knowledge that we worked together for a unique organisation.
As Head of Plays for three years, I was paid less than half my equivalents were at ITV, but we made a number of programmes that could not have been done elsewhere. We should not have to defend an organisation that, in spite of everything, is the envy of the world.
James Cellan Jones
Wells, Somerset SIR – If the Government is considering a compulsory levy on individuals, even if they do not own a television, how does this square with its belief that it is wrong for trade unions to apply a compulsory levy to finance the Labour Party? I have a choice whether to own a television, and if I choose not to then I should not be forced to pay such a levy.
John Snook
Chapeltown, South Yorkshire SIR – Under what authority will the BBC obtain the ages of viewers? If licences are means-tested, is the BBC to have access to HM Revenue and Customs records?
James Brinsford
Christchurch, Dorset SIR – I was delighted to read that the BBC is to axe 1,000 managerial posts, hopefully reducing the number doing the same job with no result.
For nearly a year I have been asking the BBC Weather department to spell the name of the village in which I live correctly on its weather app. Each email I send receives an assurance that it will be attended to, but to no avail.
I sometimes wonder if I am conversing with people from W1A.
Patsy Huddy
Hutton Buscel, North Yorkshire