TO SAY I LIKE THE BBC....but the near £300 license fee needs questioning..Lets question

[ScousyFogarty]

BBC and COMPULSORY LICENSE FEE...(Paid by rich and poor alike.)

It has been suggested that the Beebs automatic cash-flow from rich and poor, should be looked at as the fee gets closer to £300 a year.

Victoria Derbyshire mentions this on her TWITTER site. (Dont know if she has ever done it on her programme.?)

You will notice that when a big name has a book out; they get interviewed on many BBC TV and radion shows. (They are usually rich and could be charged a fee for the free book plug.)

There will be many other ideas as to how the license could be REDUCED or the money RAISED by other means.

Do you have any ideas. ? Or are we going to sit back and watch the license fee go to £300 a year? (Its food for thought.

Victoria Derbyshire and Gabby Logan may well have ideas on this . Ask them if you feel like doing so.

and Reg Kray was not the only villain in the East End.

claig can I ask where you got the story about the £112,000 from?

I don't like the licence fee, why just because you have a device that is capable of receiving the BBC must you be forced by law to towards its upkeep. Just because I own a TV doesn't mean I want to watch the BBC, I would be perfectly content watching ITV and the non BBC SKY channels. A private company would not be allowed to impose these conditions.

that fount of all knowledge, defender of the public, and scourge of all hypocrites, the Daily Mail

www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1018916/New-TV-scandal-BBC-fails-pay-100-000-charities-flawed-phone-vote.html

well said, shudaville. People are no longer doffing the cap to the mandarins, they are beginning to ask questions and want accountability, just as they did over MPs' expenses and home-flipping.

The economic answer

I

It's also the way they collect it - rude, threatening and when their system messes up, no apology or explanation.

Way back in the nineties, before I gave in to cable, I had 6 years of snow on the telly - the ariel was kaput when I moved in, the LL was not of the fixy persuasion, so channels 1-5 only, and snowy white noise. I could just about watch videos (yes, videos), but it was like watching it through a veil. Yet, because I had a knackered little colour TV, I had to pay, whether I could recieve it or no. (DD1 was going through the 'Let's watch Mary Poppins 6 times a day' phase)

So I dutifully paid, by the Cash Easy Entry scheme, t'was supposed to be about £3.82 a fortnight, but I like to round things up, so I would pay £4, therefore I was actually ahead. But every now and then, their system would spit out a threatening letter, saying I was 50p overdue (yet the letter was dated a day before it was allegedly due), and it was threatening me with all sorts. I called them, politely asked what was going on as I had all my reciepts around me and that I was actually quite ahead, not behind, and she was rude, no apology, all I could get was a begrudging "yes, you are ahead and owe us nothing".

Since becoming a Real Person Who Pays By DD, in the old flat, every now and then they'd send a snotty letter threatening the occupiers of Flat X.
"But there is no Flat X, only Y and Z" I would say,
telling them that Z paid CEE and I was DD, and they'd say
"Well that's not what the post office have told us".
I'd tell them that it had been only Y and Z for about 50 years and that they were scaring the occupier of Z with all their threats, that they have a disability and that the stress was making them worse.

I also (after phoning them about it for about the tenth time) told them that I'd knock a hole in the ceiling just to check that someone hadn't sneaked and extra floor into the two-storey building one night while we weren't looking.
Eventually they agreed that No, there isn't a flat X, and to ignore any further letters and threats. Which were still coming thick and fast when we moved out.

The moral of this rather long and tedious tale is...
If you are going to make a blanket charge, please implement it properly, fairly, and with manners.
If someone takes issue with a product you make, look into it, with manners.
Don't threaten, scare, harass, patronise or consescend just because you KNOW your 'customers' can't go elsewhere.

That incident pertains to audiocall, a BBC worldwide subsiduary that the BBC closed down after that incident, after an independent review cleared it of illegal impropriety but found it guilty of oversight and administrational error. The BBC publicly apologised on screen and subsequently closed the company down. I doubt ITV went to those lengths.

claig if you're really interested in accountability in media then you should support the BBC which is far more regulated and accountable to the public than any privately owned company.

btw that comic you call a newspaper and defender of the public is the biggest source of hypocrisy in media there is.

claig you are starting to sound like a broken record. The BBC (and other organisations) dealt with the phone voting thing eons ago. Fines were issued and paid, the whole matter is settled. Things have been resolved in that area, there were no charges of corruption, errors were made that have been fixed. Have you or the organisation you work for (assuming you work of course) never, ever made a mistake?

Of course it has been settled. I've made errors in presentations, but nothing like that. Why? Have you made such errors?

Never, I don't make mistakes

I may be wrong and spouting a lot of nonsense, but the idea that companies have unlimited budgets and can throw huge amounts of cash to advertise is a false economy.

Many advertisers are becoming a lot fussier and finding cheaper and better ways of reaching their target audiences. There was an article somewhere (Helpful I know) that a lot of the upmarket brands are reconsidering the huge sponsorships and deals for stars and celebrities.

Somewhere in the above article it actually mentions that the fact that the BBC is actually funded by the public is that it frees a lot of advertising to make more commercial stations like ITV viable.

The other issue about funding the BBC with advertising is that often the companies again have a hold about what content and slant things can take - their money there viewpoint.

dont want any cl the truth about big organisations is they try to get their own way all the time Partly an ego thing. More to dowith the penis than compromise. I Dont want any clit comparisions . Ladies may be reading this.

Here is more up-to-date information on prosecutions for licence fee payment. In 2008/2009 it was in the region of 168,800.

'The level of prosecutions is certainly substantial: 168,800 in 2008/9, constituting 30% of all non-motoring summary cases. Estimates are that 28 per cent of evaders are single parents, mostly female, and that 55 per cent of female single parents live in extreme poverty. Anecdotal evidence is that TV Licensing targets known offenders, waiting for them to fall into arrears again, and then launching a new prosecution.'

I didn't realise the BBC were building a £1bn new HQ. Has this been subsequently scrapped with the move of certain parts of the BBC out to Manchester etc. or did it go ahead?

www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/bbc/7889470/The-real-rate-of-BBC-licence-fee-evasion-is-shocking.html

The move to B'ham and M'chester is happening afaik

"dont want any cl the truth about big organisations is they try to get their own way all the time Partly an ego thing. More to dowith the penis than compromise. I Dont want any clit comparisions . Ladies may be reading this"

I'm sorry to ask, but are you drinking Scousy? I can't decipher this post at all! Can I also point out that you've forgotten to mention David Cameron in this particular post...

From reading some (most) of your threads, you seem to be promoting some warped version of communism, whereby those you perceive as 'rich' pay for everything and those you see as the deserving poor don't pay for anything.

It's truly baffling I'm afraid. It's logically impossible to have both a free, market economy, where wealth is generated and distributed via taxes whilst at the same time having a punitive system where having any money sees you immediately crippled by further taxation to fund others' lives.

It just doesn't work Scousy. Everyone stops trying and no one ends up with anything.

The BBC offers great VFM and the salaries it pays to stars are ( pretty much) market rates. If they choose not the pay the going rate, they'd soon end up with nothing worth showing and we'd end up with no BBC.

Oh no Claig, you are absolutely right about the new headquarters. It's not £1bn, nearer £300m for the new Broadcasting house IIRC (could be wrong though) Television Centre is hopelessly outdated and the maintenance is scary. The BBC are selling it off (money from the sale offsetting the cost of redeveloping Broadcasting House)

However I'm totally with you on the £800m plus being spent moving sport, children's tv and BBC Breakfast up to Salford. A criminal waste of money, all to appease people who criticise the BBC for being too London centric. I agree that the BBC needs to be more representative of the country as a whole but unless you hear more regional voices and make programmes that are actually about other parts of the country it's all just an exercise in appeasement. BBC sport will still look exactly the same, Gary Linekar will present Match of the Day from a near identical studio. How is that making the BBC less London centric?

Yes, I think you are right. But what about their new £1bn HQ? Is that still going ahead?

sorry I take that back the refurbishment of Broadcasting house is costing £1bn, but that will be offset against the sale of Television centre eventually.

claig, the redevelopment of Broadcasting house has been going on for ten years.

it's not 1bn :)

I think it's well worth the money - £12 a month - for all the channels and Radio station plus the funding of film and comercial stations :)

I guess the problem with the BH redevelopment is that it was given the go ahead at least 13 years ago when we were in a very different financial climate. Yes things are hard now but it's essential. Television centre is falling apart, it's totally outdated and costs a bomb to maintain.

I still can't justify the millions spent on the move to Salford though.

What about their pension fund? It sounds like it is in deficit? How did that happen? I suppose teh public will have to underwrite it. What are the mandarins pensions like? The ones that poor people with no pension cover at all will have to contribute towards?

When I couldn't afford the license fee I also didn't have the money for a television. After a couple of months of calling up the TV license people I managed to arrange for them to visit so they could witness that I did not have a television or any other device that could receive a live broadcase.

You don't buy a car based on the purchase price of the car. You factor in the cost of filling it up, maintaining it and purchasing insurance each year. If you are so poor that you can't afford the license fee then you also can't afford the television.

If you're that poor, and if you are a single mum with kids, then your licence fee should be waived. It's the British Broadcasting Corporation, not the Gradgrind Broadcasting Corporation.