[rtkwe]

That's fine, a well funded public broadcaster is a great idea. The question is why in the world is it done as a license fee instead of as a much simpler to implement tax or a subscription where the OTA broadcasts are encrypted and a fee is paid to maintain the ability to decrypt.

[mattmanser]

It's political. There's no parliamentary support for a general tax, but no public support for getting rid of the BBC. The Tories in particular hate the Beeb, but the public love it (contrary to the rather negative comments here).

So the tax lives on in this archaic form instead and every now and then when the Tories are in power they try and defund or threaten the BBC somehow. Usually within a year of getting elected, and then there's a backlash and they have to back down.

The latest wheeze was to force the BBC to get pensioners to pay, and they managed to pull it off by getting the public to blame the BBC instead of the government.

[usrusr]

A similar system in Germany (where we are constantly amazed at how much better content the BBC produces) is not a tax to minimize government influence. The goal is to make it public, but not government controlled.

Personally I think that it should be organized like a tax nonetheless, because if a public broadcaster is a benefit to society, it's a benefit to those who watch just as much as to those who don't watch, similar to how those who don't enter medical school will still enjoy the availability of doctors. A precedence exists, in Germany the Finanzamt is happily collecting a tax-like thing on behalf of the established churches from their members, without that ever having led anyone to suggest that the churches were controlled by the government. The investure controversy isn't exactly still lingering.

[criddell]

The current system was started after WWII (I think), so keep that in mind. If they were rolling it out today, it probably would be implemented differently.

[DanBC]

We have / had a tax but not licence fee funded channel already: Channel 4.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_4

Although they're mostly funded by ads and selling their programming now.

[noneeeed]

Channel 4 has never been funded by taxes as far as I'm aware. That wikipedia page states it was paid for by the ITV companies paying for the right to put adverts on it, and now funds itself from it's own advert sales.

Channel 4 is a bit of an odd one, as it's publically owned but not publically funded.

[jotm]

Well, one reason is to reduce the tax numbers on paper. Sort of like council tax - it's not a "real" tax, until you refuse to pay it that is.