Those are precisely the kinds of points the BBC has to address. It has to make sure that more and more of its money is spent on programming rather than on administration. That is why I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on one element of his campaign, which is that he has argued forcefully that the collection system that we must have for the licence fee costs some £100 million a year and he has asked whether there is a better way of doing that. That is a perfectly legitimate question to ask.
Of course there are those—I see the hon. Member for Shipley (Philip Davies) has just entered the Chamber at precisely the right moment—who would dismantle the licence fee. He is the only member of the Select Committee who voted to get rid of the licence fee completely. Some people would want to change it, and that is a perfectly legitimate argument to have. My concern about how the Government behaved on this issue is that the version they sent through to the House of Lords would have meant that the Government could have instituted the decriminalisation of non-payment of the licence fee without consideration of that issue within the whole package of other issues relating to the BBC and charter renewal. In effect, that would have left the door open to dismantling the licence fee without even intending to do so. I am certain that, as right hon. and hon. Members said in the House of Lords, if the Government were to proceed too swiftly, we would simply see a significant fall in licence fee take-up almost immediately. We could be talking about something in the region of £200 million or £250 million, which is more than the cost of all children’s broadcasting.
We need to think carefully about the timing of how we proceed, which is why Labour supported in the House of Lords the amendment that the Government are objecting to today, but not really objecting to. They are doing an adroit about-turn, for which we are deeply grateful. I wish to praise my colleagues in the House of Lords, particularly Lord Stevenson of Balmacara and Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town, who made sure that the amendment was carried, with a lot of cross-Bench support and a significant amount of Liberal Democrat support.
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I want to make it clear that our argument has always been that if we are going to decriminalise the licence fee, for which there are strong arguments, we need to do it as part of a debate in which we discuss the whole of charter renewal and the whole of the licence fee settlement
for the next several years. Otherwise the danger is that if we proceed too fast with just one element, like pulling on a thread in a jumper, we will pull apart the whole jumper. We would have been perfectly happy with the original amendment. Although the Government would have the power to introduce regulations decriminalising the non-payment of the licence fee, they would not be able to do so until 1 April 2017 which, as the Minister pointed out, will be past the time when the new charter for the BBC will have been agreed and the licence fee will have been settled for a further period.
We would have been happy with that amendment, but the Government have introduced a face-saving amendment, which says:
“The Secretary of State must, before the end of the period of 3 months beginning with the date on which the review is completed, lay before both Houses of Parliament a report setting out the Secretary of State’s response to the review”.
We have no objection to the Government doing that. When we are the Government, we expect to do that. I note that the Minister expects that Mr Perry will have completed his review by June or perhaps July—sometimes these things slip. That means that by the end of this year, if the motion is agreed, a Labour Government will bring forward such a report.
The vast majority of hon. Members are not like the hon. Member for Shipley—an ideologue, passionate about destroying the BBC licence fee and, to my mind, destroying the BBC and surrendering our future to commercial broadcasting in its entirety. The vast majority of Members in this House, even Government Members, who have hearts beating as socialist hearts, even if they do not yet know it, believe in the licence fee. Although we all want to see an end to unnecessary criminalisation of non-payment, we want to make sure that the licence fee is considered in its entirety when that is done. Anything else—