Im sure thats true. We had it the same way in Denmark, but have now changed it, to be payed for by taxes.. this had made it very political, and the budget is now decided by whatever party is in control, and the national tv/radio is becoming more and more of a coward because of it..
The idea is to make the poor and working classes pay for it, being regressive everyone pays the same, taxes are progressive, the more you earn the more you pay.
Government set the licence fee and legislation around it every 5 or 6 years. The last renewal put government appointed editors into the BBC in exchange for a change in Law from 'watch live BBC channels = you have to pay' to 'watch live non-BBC channels = you have to pay'. So now, even if you are just watching BBC competitors,you have to pay the BBC.. what a great business model.
I'm sure that is part of it, but I would love to see the breakdown of the costs.
When it was first introduced it made sense to have a fee, not many people had a TV so by collecting the fee, you didn't tax the people without it. But today everyone has it, so this no longer applies.
Independence argument has some merit, but I would expect that there can be different methods that would provide the same level of independence.
It's ironically gone from being a pretty progressive tax (only relatively well off people had TV's) to being a very regressive tax ("everyone" has TV's but you pay the same amount no matter how much you earn).
The independence argument has largely been destroyed by the government itself - the last few governments have tightened their control of the management of the BBC considerably to a point where budget control matters much less.
Independence went with the Hutton enquiry when Parliament set up the BBC trust to replace the BBC board of governors.
It gradually shifted from being an independent well staffed news organization that routinely held the government to account to an understaffed RT-like propaganda outfit and huffpost-like reprinter of press releases.
