Ms Patricia Cronin:

The levy order has not been reviewed in recent years. On the legislation, the Minister has acknowledged that the sector is at a tipping point and has acknowledged the difficult financial situation facing everybody in the sector. Every piece of legislation represents a balance of many different things and the Minister was very conscious of RTE and the other players. As regards the BAI levy he is keen to do something for entities which are under pressure, such as local radio, and that is why the TV licence collection system is being put out to tender. This is a big undertaking for us as it has never been put out to tender. As Deputy Ryan said, we need to understand the full impact of what we are doing. The reason we have been careful about changing the legislation is that if we put it out to tender we could select a private sector player and it is not possible for them to avoid doing some reconviction so we would need to work out that bit of it. We did a market testing exercise, in the form of a request for information, RFI, to get a feel for the market and there were ten people who were interested in TV licence collection so we need to evaluate that and learn from it.

In answer to Deputy Dooley, I think the Minister does understand and we acknowledge that this is a short-term measure, with more fundamental things having to be done in the area. We are conscious of the degree of evasion and that is the first thing the Minister has decided to tackle by putting it out to tender. There is technology to enable us to collect the TV licence in a different way and Capita uses it in the UK. We did the RFI to learn what was out there.