One of the curiosities of the Future of Media Commission’s report is that it only refers to the television licence fee “collection agent” a handful of times and never by name. It is not as if An Post did not engage with the process. It did, making one submission to the commission’s consultation on its licence fee role, then writing a supplementary letter calling for public funding for newspaper distribution.
Having decided that the licence fee should be scrapped entirely, the commission must have felt there was no need to go deep on the nitty-gritty of An Post’s place in the ecosystem and how it could evolve. A key sentence sums up its view: “The commission was left in no doubt that options to reform the current TV Licence model are significantly constrained by the inadequacy of existing data and administrative systems.”
In rejecting the commission’s key recommendation on exchequer funding and reviving the perennially vague aspiration to “overhaul” the leaky licence fee mechanism, the Government presumably believes these inadequacies can be addressed, setting up a technical group to have a gander.
An Post itself had some suggestions to the commission in this regard, calling for legislation to permit data-sharing between the relevant government agencies and pay-TV providers and outlining how investment in a new database would help reduce evasion and “optimise” revenues.
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In 2019, a previous inter-departmental working group said collection and enforcement should be the subject of a competitive tendering process, though the understanding seemed to be that this would be less about awarding the proposed five-year contract to a new agent and more about giving An Post greater certainty.
The tender proposal, forgotten in 2020′s pre-election haze, could yet resurface. For sure, Cabinet Ministers have been taking inspiration from the past this week, with Minister for Media Catherine Martin’s assertion that people who do not own television sets might be brought into the eligibility loop having a distinct 2012 feel to it.
This “future-proofing” logic is even more compelling now. In the UK, BBC iPlayer users have been obliged to pay the licence fee since September 2016. RTÉ has long wanted to follow suit and requiring sign-in to the RTÉ Player would be an obvious first step. Indeed, although it makes no mention of compulsory registration, it is one of the commission’s casual recommendations that RTÉ invests in “a single sign-on” for all public media services.
Of course, for both RTÉ and An Post, anything should be possible if enough money is thrown their way to make it so.
