Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael)

I want to raise two issues with the Minister. First, he might be surprised to hear me say this is a miserly increase for RTE this year considering that in 2002 the Minister stated that RTE will be able to seek annual increases up to the level of the consumer price index and that all future increases will be subject to the strict monitoring of performance against financial, management and programming targets. According to an independent consultant, those performance targets were met and RTE delivered value for money. We probably could not have said that a number of years ago but there has been genuine improvement in a series of sectors in RTE. Does the Minister agree that we appear to be punishing RTE for producing a budget surplus last year by reducing in real terms its licence fee with an increase of €2 when the CPI level would be €4 or €5?

Second, is it not time we did away with collecting a television licence fee and find a more efficient way of funding public service broadcasting? Will the Minister agree that continuing to collect a licence fee is an archaic, expensive, regressive and intrusive way to collect money to finance public service broadcasting? The cost of collecting taxation generally is 1% of the revenue that comes in. The cost of collection and enforcement of the television licence fee is nearly 8% of what comes in and, in addition, up to 16% of households do not pay the licence fee. The rest of us, therefore, must pay for those who are not willing to pay. People who are compliant are being punished for those who are not. It is similar to the car insurance system whereby people who pay insurance must pay for those who do not. Is it not time we examined a more modern way of financing public service broadcasting through general taxation and because in the future many people will watch television through a broadband connection on their computers or mobile phones? Are we seriously proposing to ask those people to pay a licence fee for that, whether it be on a mobile phone or a computer?

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