[Mick]

Trust the BBC
If you cant read it in the pic :
Computer users could find themselves paying double for their annual TV licence fee under current Government proposals.

This is the plan put forward by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) in a recently published green paper on the review of the BBC's royal charter. The proposals include not only retaining the licence fee but extending it to those who watch TV programmes via a broadband connection.

The DCMS concluded this would make it easier to collect licence fees, which are only based on television ownership at the moment. It claimed large numbers of people are downloading BBC media over the internet, making it increasingly difficult to enforce the licence fee. In effect, the change could see people paying twice, with a fee for a PC as well as their TV.

The paper says: "The means of collecting the fee may have to be changed, so that it became, for example, either a compulsory levy on all households or on ownership of PCs as well as TVs."

The Government says it has no plans as to how the licence fee will be collected from PC owners, saying the proposals refer to when the BBC's charter is renewed in 2006. "By that time," a representative of the Department told us, "it might be necessary to look at extending the licence fee to computers."