Culture secretary Nadine Dorries has said the next announcement about the BBC licence fee will be the last, with the government freezing the fee over the next two years.
A report in The Mail on Sunday indicated that Dorries would announce a freeze of the £159 fee until April 2024, dealing a major blow to the BBC’s finances. This news was confirmed in her statement to the House of Commons on Monday.
Ahead of her Commons address, Dorries shared The Mail on Sunday article on social network, Twitter, saying that it was time to discuss new ways to fund and sell great British content and that the “days of the elderly being threatened with prison sentences and bailiffs knocking on doors” were over.
Under the BBC’s royal charter, the license fee will exist in some form until December 31, 2027, but the extent of the fee is determined by government.
Back in 2016, the government said that the fee would rise in line with inflation for five years from April 1, 2017. Now in the waning months of that funding settlement, the broadcaster’s leaders have been locked in talks with ministers over future funding, with the government opting to freeze the fee at £159 for the next two years.
Should the licence fee have risen in line with inflation, which stands at 5.1 per cent currently, the annual charge would have increased to £167 from April this year.
However, Dorries has said that she had to consider the financial pressures on households as a result of the ongoing cost-of-living crisis, and the licence fee was an “important bill” for low income households and the elderly and that the government had to consider easing that pressure where it could.
The BBC is facing significant financial pressures of its own and was recently forced to carry out a voluntary redundancy programme. Back in 2019, the corporation had sought to recoup funds by ending free TV licences for all over-75s, with a Covid-19 related grace period on payment having lapsed at the end of July 2021.
The move saw the BBC come under heavy criticism and meant that only individuals in receipt of pension credit were exempt from paying the fee.
BBC sources had said of the fee that “anything less than inflation would put unacceptable pressure” on the corporation’s finances, after having lost 30 per cent of its income in real terms over the last decade through funding cuts.
The licence fee generates around £3.2 billion per year in income, with a further £1.5 billion in funds coming from commercial sales. Reports have indicated that the BBC could lose out on as much as £2 billion over the next six years if the licence fee remains frozen for that length of time.
While supporting the existence of the BBC, Dorries has previously said that the corporation needed to be able to compete with major market forces such as the Amazon Prime and Netflix streaming services.
Speaking at the Conservative party conference in October 2021, Dorries said that the BBC needed “real change” and accused the corporation of left-wing political bias.
Photo taken from Wikimedia Commons
