TV Licensing

Today I ran across, figuratively only of course, a blogger being harassed by the UK government to buy a TV license when he doesn't own a TV. My first reaction was that it must be spam of some sort. I had never heard of TV licensing. Although I have spent a couple of months in London, it was as a teenager with my parents before TV licensing was enacted. Being an American who pays plenty for cable TV and having experienced BBC TV, I couldn't imagine paying a tax of over 100 pounds per year to support BBC TV. In the UK, people do go to prison for not paying their TV license and fines if caught and convicted.

Having stumbled across such a thing, I was curious to find out why it was enacted. The British TV licensing web site gives lots of information about how much you have to pay under what circumstances, but it doesn't give any information about why TV licensing was enacted. I have found some web sites fighting TV licensing, such as Dealing with TV Licensing, Abolish the TV License and Campaign to Abolish the TV License, which provide more information. Apparently, it is primarily intended to support the state BBC TV channels, but people are not allowed to opt out of receiving them and the license does not depend on actual viewership, only the possession of television reception equipment. There are few exception, for example, blind people get a 50% reduction in the TV license amount and Seniors over 75 do not have to pay at all. Non-viewers are generally harassed with threatening letters, rather than accepted as an exempt category.

The amount of funding that the BBC receives through TV licensing is far greater than NPR receives from the US government. While about 75% of the BBC's over 2 billion pound budget is covered by the British government's TV License, only about 2% of NPR's budget comes from the US government. The BBC censors much of the news about controversy surrounding TV licensing because it can't afford to run in its current state without it. It sounds to me like it's time for the Brits to have their own version of the Boston Tea Party, a London TV Party, where a load of televisions gets ceremoniously dumped into the harbor.

Technorati Tags: BBC blog blogs Janine White license tax taxation technology television TV

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