[jambutty]

Originally Posted by andrewb

The BBC is funded directly by the licence fee. BBC World Service is funded by a government grant.

Congratulations on being made “Administrator”.

Although there is a link between the TV licence and BBC funding, BBC funding is not dependant on how many licences are sold. The funding is set by the government and is guaranteed by Royal Charter and fixed at regular and infrequent intervals. The government off-sets this expenditure by gathering the TV licence fee.

The BBC is charged with the task of issuing the TV licence, collecting the fees and keeping track of who does and does not have a TV licence when they should have one to conform with the law. A separate department under the BBC umbrella carries out this task.

The annual BBC funding is currently some £4.3 billion. The current colour TV licence is £139.50. To generate £4.3 billion by the licence fee alone, some 31 million TV licences would have to be sold.

With a population of some 60 million in the UK there are probably in the region of 15 million domestic properties, although 10 million is a more likely figure. Chuck in a few more million for pubs, clubs, hotels etc and even with 20 million domestic properties it still wouldn’t reach 31 million.

The BBC generates extra revenue by the sale of the programmes that it makes and pays tax on the proceeds.

If by some major miracle everyone decided not to renew their TV licence it would not affect the BBC funding at all until the next revue. Similarly if the BBC suddenly ceased to exist we would still be required to have a TV licence.