It’s time to scrap the TV licence fee altogether

When one is used to having something for nothing, it hurts to be asked to pay for it: hence the howls that have accompanied the BBC’s decision to scrap universally free-of-charge television licences for the over-75s. Lord Hall, the director-general, has been challenged to explain his reasoning for this flagrant violation of elderly rights; but it would, surely, be more pertinent to ask him to justify why there should be a licence fee at all.

In the days – well within living memory – when the only way to receive a television picture was through an aerial on the roof, and it was provided either by the BBC, funded by a licence fee, or by Independent Television, funded by advertising, one could make an argument for the public to pay a tax to receive those pictures, so that the tax could fund the public service broadcaster.

Now that millions pay a subscription to receive hundreds of TV channels via cable or satellite, that argument hardly pertains. More to the point, millions also choose to stream programmes on a computer, tablet or telephone. The intellectual link between broadcasting and a TV licence fee has been strained almost to the point of severance.

The BBC is a public service broadcaster only in that it serves a distinct group of the public, who are the mirror-images of its main executives. Its presumptions in its output, whether of fact or fiction, are liberal and not conservative. It is not a party political bias, but a bias of values and of a world view, slanted towards the liberal and the radical.

Like all essentially statefunded operations, it has the luxury of behaving in this way because it need

not worry about raising money from customers who have the choice of whether to pay or not. Given the technological realities of the 21st century, this restrictive and highly inefficient practice is unsustainable.

I would pay the equivalent of the licence fee – £3 a week – just to subscribe to Radio 3. The rest of what the Corporation provides is of almost no interest to me, either because of its vacuity or tendentiousness, or because one can find better elsewhere.

The BBC would protest that, on the contrary, all that it does is excellent. If so, it should have no fear of charging for it.

To do so would help it break out of the civil service culture that stifles creativity and pursues, too often, the lowest common denominator.

Much of what is broadcast seeks to match the drivel pumped out by many commercial operators; perhaps if the BBC started to charge subscriptions, rather than being the permanent and largely undeserving beneficiary of a tax, it might feel it had the freedom to start making programmes for people who feel they do not need to be patronised, either in regard to their intelligence or their politics.

The British Broadcasting Company was founded in 1922. Its approaching centenary surely should be marked by a modernisation of its funding. Lord Reith did an astonishing job, but the society he served and the means by which he served it are no more. The moment has come for the BBC’s business model to reflect that. at telegraph.co.uk/opinion