The BBC gives good value for 42p a day

THERE have been many letters in recent weeks about ending free TV licences for those over 75, with many aggrieved and angry with the BBC.

While understanding people’s worries and anger over this, I feel that perhaps the pressures facing the BBC have been underestimated.

Free TV licences for over- 75s were introduced in 2000 by the then Chancellor, Gordon Brown, as part of a package of benefits for older people like free travel and the winter fuel allowance. It was widely seen as a positive social- welfare measure.

In 2015, the then Chancellor George Osborne, as part of the negotiations around renewal of the BBC Charter, gained agreement from the BBC that they would fund licences for over- 75s – in effect making the BBC fund a social- welfare measure out of its income rather than the Treasury.

In the last decade, the BBC has also taken over funding for covering the costs of digital switchover from analogue TV; rural broadband rollout; local TV; funding of Welsh- language channel S4C, funding the World Service and Monitoring Service; paying for journalists employed by local newspapers to cover local democracy and funding commercial broadcasters to make children’s TV and radio.

In the last charter period, it has made savings of £ 1.6bn (£ 244m a year) and is committed to making savings of a further £ 40m by 2022.

It represents good value for money, providing news, entertainment, factual, radio, internet, education and children’s television. The list goes on.

No one person could or would want to consume it all but it is there for the very nominal sum of £ 157.50 – about 42p a day.

Despite all this, the BBC continues to face a climate of unprecedented hostility from government and accusations of bias, profligacy and worse.

I truly believe the BBC is a great public- service broadcaster. It’s not perfect and of course it should be held to account through the various checks and balances such as Charter renewal and the overview of Ofcom.

But it does mean that if we want to keep it, we should value it, even if we don’t agree with everything it says or enjoy all its output.