Perhaps what the hon. Gentleman says reflects his constituency, but for the majority of the time that I have been a Member of Parliament, the only way that my constituents could get BBC 3, BBC 4 or, in most parts of it, BBC 2, let alone Channel 4, was to pay Sky. It had an absolute monopoly on digital television in the south Wales valleys. Because of the mixture of platforms, the geography, the various ways in which, for instance, mansion block flats in London work and all the rest of it, it is important that we have a public service broadcaster with a commitment and a statutory requirement to deliver to every household and provide something for everybody: the 83-year-old who only likes listening to Chaucer and Mantovani—if there is a person who only likes that combination—and the 18-year-old who is only interested in the kind of things that are shown on BBC 3.
That is an important commitment and we need that combination, because as somebody once put it to me, if we are to have one 800 lb gorilla in the forest, in the shape of Sky, it is a good idea to have a second 800 lb gorilla in the forest, because that is safer for everybody. The competition we have in the UK between public service broadcasting and the commercial sector is positive. We were wrong in the past to campaign against having ITV and the commercial sector and all the rest. It is right to have that mixture. The two feed off each other, and Sky is now finally learning that it is a good idea to produce programmes of its own.
The licence fee is a phenomenal success for this country. The £2.7 billion that the hon. Gentleman talks of is basically an investment in production, which is why programmes are sold all around the world. We are the only country in Europe that manages to be a net exporter of programming. That might be because of our history, but I think it is also because we have a strong BBC. I also think that the alternatives to the licence fee that are experienced elsewhere in Europe, which many people tout—for instance, Germany has a mixture of a licence fee and advertising, others have a public service broadcasting model based just on advertising, and the Netherlands has a fixed amount of income tax—are more flawed than the licence fee. To paraphrase Churchill, yes, the licence fee may be terrible—for all the reasons that I am sure people can adduce: it is not progressive, it bears down unequally, it affects everybody, whether they are rich or poor, and all the rest of it—but it is better than all the alternatives.