Tony Hall fends off the mad rush to buy BBC subscriptions
The BBC is thinking of introducing subscription for the over 75’s….though it’s voluntary and you can still watch the BBC if you don’t cough up regardless of your income. However if you are a poor, bedraggled single mum with 18 kids, impoverished and made homeless by the Tories cruel welfare reforms, the BBC will still seek to have you banged up for non-payment….and blame the Tories for it.
BBC urges pensioners to voluntarily give up free licence fee
The BBC is to urge pensioners to voluntarily give up their free licence fee to save the corporation and protect their favourite programmes.
The BBC is to ask the over-75s to opt out of their entitlement to free licence fees, hinting that it will help secure the future of television or radio programmes.
A senior executive at the corporation said the elderly will be invited to pay at least £145.50 each year to the “cost of the BBC’s services” after it takes over responsibility for funding free licence fees in the years to come.
James Heath, director of policy at the BBC, said: “We will give those eligible households an opportunity to voluntarily pay for a TV licence and so make a contribution to the cost of the BBC’s services.”
Curiously the cost of any largesse towards pensioners has suddenly shot up from £650 million…
Heath has now warned the cost of the over-75s television licence will amount to £725million per year carved out of the BBC’s budgets; substantially more than the £600m regularly quoted previously.
Another shot across the bows from the BBC in the propaganda war it fights so relentlessly on its own behalf using licence payer’s money to defend its entrenched privileges and over-dominant, ‘imperial’, position.
If they can have subscription for one group why not everyone? I imagine most people would still buy it so what’s the problem….are the BBC not as confident in their own quality of programmes as they claim…..
The case for the BBC doesn’t rest on ideological arguments, nor on debates between economists. It rests on what we do.
We’re here to make great programmes and services. That’s why people like the BBC. That’s why they enjoy it. That’s why they trust it. That’s why they value it. That’s what they pay us to do.
.
Tony Hall….Put your confidence where our money is then…..test that assertion without threats of court action, fines or prison to encourage us to buy into your product.
“…. the cost of the over-75s television licence ….” is £zero.
It’s a marginal cost.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_cost
It was a fantastic revenue stream – every single person over the age of 75 was suddenly worth £145.50 to the BBC. I imagine that the ‘evasion rate’ amongst the elderly dropped to zero.
Now they have lost that income, so the cost to the BBC is huge. Excellent.
I look forward to reaching the ripe old age of 75 so that I can refuse to give the bloated, leftist, anti British ,anti democratic, multy culty, corporation even a washer! I wouldn’t cross the road to **** on them if they were on fire.
Why wait until then?Refusing to pay them has had such a good effect on my blood pressure that I may now have a chance of reaching 75…
Me too but when I reach 75 I shall apply for a free tv licence.
I have always loved radio, at first it was BBC radio, but then I discovered shortwave radio and listened to this long before satelite TV and the internet. International Shortwave radio brought (and still does) news and opinions from other parts of the world. It was listening to these international broadcasters that made me realise how much the BBC has done it’s best to keep us in the dark. The BBC has always been a law unto itself. Why for instance has the BBC for many years continued to avoid any coverage of the TT races in the Isle of Man, only mentioning occasional accidents in it’s news reports? At the moment I can avoid paying for this Bloated Biased Corporation . Subscription would seem logical but the BBC seems keen on a tax added to council tax – then we really will be stuffed.
Why wait? vote here……………………………..
https://you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/end-the-bbc-licence-fee
And spread the news .
When the BBC can’t forcibly take your money with threats of imprisonment, they’ll instead beg you to give them money.
Classy.
Perhaps they should stop paying their loony-leftie propagandists…sorry, “comedians” and “presenters” millions upon millions and save some money that way instead of taking advantage of the old and senile.
Sajid Javid would of course want the Licence Fee to be cut by half, so that the BBC “will get more in.” Maybe it is a shame that he lost his job to Whittingdale?
Am sure the BBC would agree with that, especially after so many at the BBC have benefited from the 50% cut in the top rate of Income Tax. :-p
I wonder if there’ll be a Panorama investigation into the BBC harassing old people with begging letters?
The Now Show was its usual unfunny sneering half hour today .
Mostly about how the old have had it good at the expense of everyone else.
Now why don’t the old time wasting coffin dodgers give generously to help the BBC.
Interesting – so the BBC is not at all averse to a subscription system…..
But, of course, only when it suits this fat-cat-feeding, bloated, parasitical, £4bn p.a. ‘institution’.
Plus the £1.5 Billion or so that they rake in from worldwide sales
I know that Top Gear and Dr Who are popular, but what else are they selling abroad?
When the BBC is faced with competition it usually ‘clones’ and copies a successful ‘target’ i.e pirate radio was the inspiration behind Radio 1 inception. Since then copying any comeptition is normal (Radio 5 to copy the (new) LBC upstart ‘natch’). It has also tried and failed (with Radio 3) to copy the success of Classic FM by copying the play-list and loose ‘style’ which miffed the few BBC R3 listeners it had left. . For TV media it (BBC) is not against throwing a big ticket ‘spoiler’ if ITV seems to be scheduling a better (more popular) programs at its peak viewing time. They call that ‘competing’. But it’s also lost its most powerful draw ‘Top gear’ which even if reinvented is not the real thing any more. The BBC may have more money (our money), but they would have to be privatised to make any ‘real’ money and that is ‘verbotten’ (unless it is to line their own deep pockets in an offshore account). It cannot compete with NetFlix which it thinks it can ‘copy’. A BBC subscription service would be ‘popular’ (hah!) for the far reaches of Wales and the far corner of Scotland – that has had such poor reception from the Scottish Labour party (SNP wants their own broadcaster perhaps) or maybe the Guardian newspaper is in short supply there. If it can make any money from that bountiful ‘vision’ of hundreds of thousands ‘signing up’ en masse, then they can afford to reduce the license fee to £1.45p or abolish it when the management skills (we know so well) fail to make any money from ‘coded messages’ but come back to the taxpayer for an even BIGGER bailout like Greece only larger. Of course the BBC will try and fail and fail again. That is the BBC ‘ethos’. Its imperial attachment to the left is undimmed as long as they have our money to play with to sponsor ‘talent’ (their words). We know it won’t end well.
I’m a senile 75, so I say to the bbc and its pleading to me to pay up : f* off!
“Heath has now warned the cost of the over-75s television licence will amount to £725 million per year carved out of the BBC’s budgets; substantially more than the £600m regularly quoted previously”.
Seasonally adjusted for migrants?
Wealthy lefties are not averse to saying they should be paying more income tax, Charlotte Church being the most recent. But when it is pointed out to them that they can easily voluntarily pay more, they suddenly go off the idea.
I urge pensioners to follow the wealthy lefties rule on this one. Stick the BBC’s begging letter back in the envelope and mark it ‘return to sender’.
LF
It would be interesting to see which countries (high tax ,low tax) have the most voluntary donors to the taxman .
Is there a website , or some other formality , where those who think we should pay more tax can pledge their earnings to the taxman .?
When the licence fee for the over-75s was paid by the tax paye, chances are that some over-75s didn’t apply for a licence so the BBC didn’t get any money for them. Now that the BBC has to pick up the tab they deem that every over-75 could have a licence so they base the “cost” on that number.
If they are such sticklers, perhaps they should refund the part-used licence fees for the over-75s who die. When the under-75s die their executors can claim a refund of the unexpired portion of the licence fee if there is no-one left in the house. But when the over-75’s have died, the BBC has kept the unexpired balance of the licence fee because the government has not bothered to claim it back.
Anyone household watching live TV needs a licence and TV Licensing will hound addresses on their database without a licence so you can be pretty sure the over-75s that need one will have one. In most cases that will be one that they have been renewing for the last fifty years or so, (worth a loyal customer discount?).
I had a go before at trying to work out where the BBC gets its £750 million from. I think I picked up on the wrong line on the ONS spreadsheet so my numbers were wrong, (it was late at night and I don’t have a team of researchers cross-checking for me!). Anyway the ONS Mid-2014 estimate of 75-year olds and above is 5,211,411 which multiplied by £145.50 gives £758M. So essentially the BBC is assuming that they all apply and that none of them live with someone in the same group. Before they reach the cut-off age some of this group might have been getting a concession by virtue of living in a care home or by being blind.
It does raise the question as to why the BBC thinks it should be paid for each individual older person, yet multi-person households effectively share the cost between them.
Sounds like the sort of thing that a Beeboid would expect a wicked Toreee to do, charge the poor lonely pensioner full whack for their only pleasure, whilst the fund-manager and his banker wife and their three privately-educated brats lounge in front of their individual ‘home cinema’ screens for the same fee!
Ridiculous idea.
I can’t imagine any over-75 surrendering a perk that most of them see as a “right”.
The BBC are hypocrites and leaches the sooner the Beeboids get into there’ll worldwide the better
If over 75s can go to subscription why can’t the rest of us?
The BBC is one over bloated hypocritical and racist Gravy Train.