HL Deb 22 June 1967 vol 283 cc1557-70

3.59.p.m.

Order of the Day for the Second Reading read.

BARONESS PHILLIPS

My Lords, I beg to move that this Bill be now read a second time. This Bill was foreshadowed in the White Paper on Broadcasting (Command Paper No. 3169) published last December. The White Paper referred to the Government's review of measures against licence evasion and to their discussions with the associations representing retailers and the rental companies. It announced that legislation will be brought before Parliament in the current Session. This Bill fulfils that undertaking.

Its main object is to make possible new and effective measures against people who use their television sets without having taken out a licence from the Postmaster General to do so. Part I of the Bill proposes to put this situation right by empowering the Postmaster General to obtain from television dealers the names and addresses of people to whom they have supplied television sets. I hope to convince your Lordships of two things: first, that the problem of television licence evasion is bad enough to justify really drastic new measures against it; and, secondly, that the new measures which the Bill has chosen are the right ones.

The figures all go to show that licence evasion has reached scandalous proportions. Television Audience Measurement, for the purpose of providing their subscribers with information about the number of people reached by the advertisements on Independent Television, carry out a sample survey on a nationwide scale. A by-product of this sample is that it provides an accurate estimate of the number of private householders with television. The latest available figures from TAM show that at the beginning of this year there were 16 million such households. At the same date there were 14 million television licence holders. It is a matter of simple subtraction that this leaves 2 million households which ought to be licensed, but are not. The loss of revenue to the Exchequer amounts to £10 million every year. Every licence holder is subsidising the evaders to the Tune of 12s. each year. No Government could allow this situation to continue, and that is why the Bill has been introduced.

So much, then, for the basic—and disquieting—fact. That is the situation with which my right honourable friend the Postmaster General was confronted. It did not, of course, follow as night follows day that information from dealers would be needed. Was there perhaps something fundamentally at fault with the methods of the Post Office in enforcing the licence system? Or, if not a fundamental fault, were there perhaps a number of failings which, even though relatively minor in themselves, could together explain the massive loss of revenue? And, finally, were the methods of enforcement being applied with the necessary vigour? The answers to these questions is, my Lords, that though there were ways in which the Department's procedure could be tightened up, something very much more was needed.

In essence, the reason is this. First, the initiative in taking out a first licence lies largely with the individual who installs or uses the set. As things stand, the Post Office simply do not know that the set is being installed or used. The notification procedure (in Clause 2 of the Bill) will ensure that in future the Post Office do know. Then there is the next step. As things stand at present, if the individual in question comes to the Post Office, as indeed the overwhelming majority do, and takes out a licence, then of course he is on the Department's records. Thereafter, they can try to ensure that he renews his licence annually. Unfortunately, they cannot guarantee to do so.

One might suppose that, once the person was on the books, there would be no further difficulty. But people move. In some urban areas, as many as 10 per cent. of the households move house in a year; and the Post Office lose track of many of them. Once again, the initiative lies largely with the individual. If he remembers to renew his licence and does so, splendid. He is back on the Post Office records and all is well. But he may not remember. How many of us would remember, without being prompted, that it is precisely one year since we paid the £5 due; and that it is time to pay again?

When, some months afterwards, it strikes a person that it is a long time since he last paid, it will also occur to him that the Post Office have not asked him to renew his licence, and if in these circumstances some people feel no pressing need to go and pay £5 to renew a licence, need we feel astonished? Noble Lords will, I hope, feel able to agree that the initiative lies largely with the individual. What Part I of the Bill is designed to do is to put the initiative where it ought to be: with the Post Office. It will give the Post Office access to lists of everybody who rents his set or is buying it on hire-purchase or credit sale, so that it will be possible to get back on the Post Office's records more than half of the people who have escaped from them.

Now I come to the new approach contained in the Bill. As I have said, Part I is designed to put the initiative with the Post Office. It does so as follows. In future, every time a householder gets a set, new or second-hand, from a dealer, the dealer will have to tell the Post Office. In this way the Post Office will know that this householder has a set. If there is no licence, there will be an inquiry to be made. It will not be the old inquiry, addressed hit-or-miss to the man without a licence, so much as to the man who has a set. It will be a purposeful inquiry. The evaders will know that the Post Office has very good grounds for believing that he has a set.

Moreover, the Bill does not require my right honourable friend to wait until every evader has to replace his set. The Bill empowers the Postmaster General also to obtain from every dealer who lets out sets under the rental or hire-purchase agreements, or is selling them under credit sale agreements, within a specified time—not less than a year of his asking for the information—a list of the names and addresses of people who currently have sets under agreements made before the coming into force of Part I of the Bill. This power will enable us to make a really telling impact on existing evasion without having to wait for the evaders to replace their sets.

The other thing the Bill does is to put up the maximum penalties that the courts may impose on convicted evaders. The present maximum fines are £10 for a first offence and £50 for a subsequent offence, with the added option, little used in practice, of ordering the forfeiture of unlicensed receiving sets. The Bill would abolish forfeiture of unlicensed receiving sets, but increase the maximum fines to the point where they can really bite on the evader who has been saving himself the expense of buying licences: up to £50 for a first offence and up to £100 for a subsequent offence.

Before I leave Part I of the Bill I ought to refer to the attitude of the associations representing the television dealers. Before deciding to put forward the proposals in the Bill my right honourable friend the Postmaster General received from them all the help he could wish in the way of comments and advice on ways and means of making his proposals work. The dealers' associations would much rather that their members should not be required to help the Post Office, but, given Her Majesty's Government's decision, they have unreservedly given their counsel on how to make it work. For our part, we have done all we can to make the scheme as little burdensome to the dealers as is consistent with its objectives. And when the Bill was being considered in another place my right honourable friend the Postmaster General referred to his decision to issue special demonstration licences to dealers, at a very small charge, and representing a useful saving in money to the dealers; and held out the hope that if things went really well he might be able to put off for a while, or even altogether, the operation of Clause 3(2): that is to say, the provision by dealers of information about sets already held on hire when the Bill comes fully into force.

My Lords, we all recognise that Part I of the Bill is unwelcome to the dealers. The Government carefully considered the idea that the operation of Part I should be put off to see whether the effect of more intensive measures by the Postmaster General, higher penalties and more publicity, was enough in itself. But we had to reject it. With £10 million being lost every year we cannot wait to try the effect of higher penalties coupled with the existing machinery, which may not have done a bad job but of its nature cannot achieve and sustain the big reduction in evasion which the honest majority have a right to expect.

The other provision of the Bill which may call for a word or two of explanation is the proposed power to control the import and manufacture of wireless telegraphy apparatus giving rise to interference. This is to cope with the situation in which, to take an example, walkie-talkie transmitters, designed for use on frequencies not allocated for use in Britain to transmitters of this kind, are freely imported and freely put on sale. The Postmaster General cannot license these transmitters because of the interference they may cause to authorised services. But so long as they are freely on sale, people buy them before discovering that he will not license them. They are naturally indignant with the Government at allowing this state of affairs to continue. The Bill will enable my right honourable friend to put a stop to it. There is, however, no question of his using the powers sought in the Bill to interfere with the reasonable wish of radio amateurs, or any other licensed users of radio, to import or make equipment of a kind my right honourable friend is willing to license. But everybody stands to benefit by the removal from the market of transmitters which cannot be licensed.

Now a short account of the main clauses of the Bill. Clause I requires dealers, with certain exceptions, to register with the Postmaster General. This is an essential preliminary to the use of information from dealers. Clause 2 provides that every dealer who deals direct with the customer shall, after the latest day on which he is required to register, send the Postmaster General a written notification every time he supplies a television set; and keep certain records of such transactions. Other dealers, namely, rental companies and hire purchase finance companies who do not deal direct with the customer, are also required to keep records if they themselves collect the rental or instalment payments direct from the customer, but not otherwise. The Schedule to the Bill sets out the particulars to be notified and recorded.

Clause 3 empowers the Postmaster General to call for further information in two different situations. They are alike in that both involve a continuing relationship between the dealer and his customer: this is that the customer remains under agreement to make regular payments to the dealer. In the first case, the Post Office may have lost track of the customer, who has moved. Subsection (1) of the clause would empower the Postmaster General to ask the dealer whether there is an agreement still in force and, if so, what is the present or last known address of the buyer or hirer. The power is one which the Postmaster General would continue to use indefinitely. Subsection (2) of the clause relates to the second case. In order to make an immediate inroad into the existing evasion, the Postmaster General seeks in this subsection to be empowered to require any dealer, by notice in writing, to supply him with a list of the names and addresses of all persons who have sets from the dealer under agreements made before Part I of the Bill is activated, and still in force when he supplies the list. Since for the big rental companies supplying these lists will be quite a sizeable task, there is to be a time allowed of not less than twelve months in which to supply them. However, this is a once-for-all operation.

Clause 7 would empower the Postmaster General to make orders that certain apparatus, to be specified in the orders, may not be imported or manufactured without the Postmaster General's authority and on such terms and conditions as may be attached to that authority. The object of this power is defined as for the purpose of preventing or reducing the risk of interference with wireless telegraphy". It would be an offence to contravene the provisions of the clause. Clause 8 makes possible the inclusion in a vehicle excise licence application form of questions designed to establish whether a radio is fitted in the vehicle. My right honourable friend the Minister of Transport will not make use of this power until she has centralised the issue of vehicle Excise licences. But the power has been included in the Bill so as to provide when the time comes for the more effective enforcement of this requirement.

We shall, of course, have the opportunity to look at the details in Committee, but I hope in the meantime that the objects of the Bill will be as welcome to your Lordships as they have been in another place and in the country as a whole, and accordingly that the Bill will be given a Second Reading without a Division. I beg to move.

Moved, That the Bill be now read 2a.

4.12 p.m.

LORD DENHAM

My Lords, this Bill has become urgently necessary, partly owing to the difficult financial position in which the B.B.C. finds itself, and in view of our previous debates I cannot resist saying to the noble Baroness that this is not helped by the prospect of the increased expenses which will arise from the new programme, Radio 247 and the local radio experiment, and the refusal of Her Majesty's Government to consider financing either of these from advertising revenue. Be that as it may, it is clearly intolerable that, while so much must be financed by licence revenue, one person in eight evades payment, and thereby puts an unfair burden on the other seven. This must be stopped.

My honourable friends in another place have questioned very closely the propriety of putting on the retailers of television sets the onus of collecting information for the Post Office. They felt that perhaps Her Majesty's Government should examine more closely the alternative methods of catching licence evaders, such as the provision of more detector vans, a declaration on the rating form with regard to possession of a television set, or even the possibility of relying solely on the increased penalties under this Bill, so as to avoid inflicting on television retailers what they regard as the distasteful duty of spying on their customers. These points have been discussed very fully in another place, and, rightly or wrongly, have been rejected by Her Majesty's Government, and I do not intend to go into them again. I am going to concentrate on asking Her Majesty's Government to ensure that the additional burden of work placed on the shopkeeper is kept down to the absolute minimum.

Your Lordships may not realise what a totally disproportionate amount of paper work and book work the shopkeeper, and especially the small shopkeeper, has to cope with. I speak somewhat feelingly on this point, as a keeper of small shops, although I have no interest to declare in regard to this Bill. Many suppliers of television and wireless sets are small businesses. Often the two or three man business provides especially good service in this field. It is a definite advantage to feel that the man who discussed with you the merits of various sets, and helped you to choose one, is also the man who installs it, and the man whom you will ask to come and put it right when it goes wrong. But someone in the small business has to keep the accounts—the daily takings book, the bank and cash book, the petty cash book, the wages book and many others, in a state that will make enough sense for the annual audit, and he also has to fill in the various forms that go with them. Your Lordships may think that to a man who can find his way through the jungle of multi-coloured wires behind a cathode ray tube, filling in a form—even a Government form—must be child's play. But I doubt it. Now he is to have imposed on him the additional burden of the forms and records laid down in the Schedule to this Bill. I ask that this burden be made as easy as possible.

Noble Lords have often complained about the way in which Government Bills are drafted, apparently so as to be quite incomprehensible. The Schedule to this Bill is a prime example. I had to read it three times before I could get any sense out of it at all. I ask your Lordships to look at Part I of the Schedule, "Particulars to be Notified", paragraph 6. It reads: If the set is not and is not to be installed as aforesaid but is or is to be delivered by the dealer or another person to his order to any premises, the address of those premises. Could not even a few commas be added to that, to help to make sense out of it? Are the instructions to retail shops to be worded like that? My first plea, therefore, is that the instructions to the shops should be re-written so that they can be clearly understood the first time they are read, without making someone puzzle over them.

Part I of the Schedule lists the particulars of each sale or letting that must be forwarded to the Post Office by dealers. Part II gives the fuller information of which the dealer must keep a note in case the Post Office need it at a later date. Surely more information is asked for in Part I than is absolutely necessary in the first instance. Surely all the information the Post Office need at this stage is the date of the transaction, the name and address of the buyer or hirer, and, if it is different from the foregoing, the address where the set is to be installed or delivered. All this could be written on one line of a simple form, which would be easy to read and easy to fill in. The Post Office could then check it against the list of licence-holders, and if it were found that the buyer or hirer had no licence, a card could be sent to him, similar to the present licence reminders, asking why he had bought a television set without acquiring a licence. If any further action is needed after that, the information can he obtained from the shopkeeper's records which are required to be kept under Part II of the Schedule.

The additional information included in Part I will be needed only in a tiny fraction of cases. Her Majesty's Government calculate that at present one household in eight omit to pay the licence fee. The increased fines, and the virtual certainty of being found out under the provisions of this Bill, will cut this figure drastically. A card from the Post Office, letting evaders know that they have been found out, will bring all but the most intransigent of the remainder running with their £5 fee. To ask for such full information to be furnished in every case, when it will be needed only in such a tiny fraction of the cases, will add un-unnecessarily to the work and expense of the retailers, which in the circumstances is unpardonable, and will add unnecessarily to the work and expense of the Post Office, which this Bill is designed to minimise. My second plea, therefore, is for drastic pruning of the information demanded under Part I of the Schedule.

My third plea is that the Post Office should issue retailers and hire-purchase companies with printed record books, in which to record the details required to be kept under Parts II and III of the Schedule. This would involve small expense to the Post Office, and would save a great deal of time, labour and confusion for the firms which are being conscripted under this Bill to do part of the Post Office's work.

There is one other point that I should like to raise with regard to these lists in the Schedule, and it concerns the question they use in each Part: Whether a particular set is designed for reception in colour. I should like to ask the noble Baroness if she can tell me whether the Postmaster General intends to issue a special licence at a different price for people who have sets that can receive the colour programmes. If so, I am quite certain that this has not been publicised, or at least not publicised enough, and I think it should be made clear, so that people who are trying to decide whether they can afford a colour set can take this additional factor into consideration. If there is no question of a differential licence fee, obviously this particular question is unnecessary in all the Parts. Apart from those points, I welcome the principle of this Bill and I ask your Lordships to give it a Second Reading.

4.21 p.m.

LORD AIREDALE

My Lords, nobody on these Benches could fail to support the Second Reading of this Bill, seeing that it was just about twelve years ago that Mr. Eric Lubbock, who was then with Rolls Royce Limited at Derby but has since removed to Orpington, put forward as a suggestion what is in fact almost identically Part I of the Bill. The Postmaster General of 12 years ago appeared to think that the objections to Mr. Lubbock's suggestion were practically insuperable, but here we have Part I of this Bill and we on these Benches are very pleased to see it.

The noble Lord, Lord Denham, has quarrelled with the Schedule. I should like to take one step back from there and quarrel with the Short Title. We have had Wireless Telegraphy Bills since 1904, and of course I am only too pleased to think that we should use the same language to describe the same sorts of things so as to be consistent—that is provided we are talking about the same sort of things, because in this world you cannot usually legislate perfectly, but you can sometimes legislate with certainty and consistency by sticking to the same expressions to describe the same things.

This Bill does not deal with the same sorts of things with which the Wireless Telegraphy Bill 1904 dealt. In 1904 the pioneers of wireless telegraphy were seeking to send messages from point A to point B by wireless. They realised, of course, that other persons with receiving sets would be able to intercept the messages, but this was positively antagonistic to what they were seeking to achieve. It was not until 16 years later that we got the first public sound broadcasting in 1920, and it was another 16 years before we got the first public television service in 1936. This was a British institution, and it began from Alexandra Palace in 1936. In 1954 we had a Television Act. In 1964 we had another Television Act. I would have hoped that that marked the end of the expression "wireless telegraph" to describe television which, after all, is, one of the great marvels of the modern age, and I suppose has done more to broaden the human mind than anything since the invention of Caxton. I would therefore ask the noble Baroness whether she thinks I shall have any luck when we come to Committee if I seek to amend the Short Title by striking out "Wireless Telegraph" and inserting "Television and Radio"?

4.25 p.m.

THE EARL OF SHANNON

My Lords, I must apologise for intervening in this debate, because I am not on the official list of runners, but having read the Bill I feel that I should like to draw your Lordships' attention most especially to Part II, Clause 7. With regard to the first Part of the Bill, I do not think that any of us, especially those who are, the rather smug possessors of our £5 licences, have any great difference of opinion on licence fees. Equally, there is no more mournful dirge than the sound of the Treasury bewailing loss of revenue.

With regard to Clause 7, I would suggest to your Lordships that it is really far too widely drafted. I should like to ask the noble Baroness whether she could state in detail what classes of equipment are likely to be covered. I know she gave your Lordships an assurance that the radio amateurs and their activities are not likely to be interfered with, but in view of the wide coverage of this clause I would suggest that it might be possible for some proviso to be made that an offence shall be committed only if such equipment were actually used. It is very difficult sharply to delineate exactly what equipment will or will not cause interference. I am not pleading that we should be allowed to use with free licence all the old, now probably almost antique, regenerative and super- regenerative receiver circuits so popular in the 1920s and whose oscillations, if badly used, caused absolute chaos over a wide band of the spectrum. But I think we should have some assurance, an even greater assurance than we have had already, that the private manufacture by amateurs of certain equipment will not be liable in this way unless an offence is occasioned by its actual use. Perhaps attention might be given to this on Committee.

I would also point out that subsection (7) of Clause 7, as it appears at the moment, is so wide that it covers pretty well every manufacturer of any type of equipment or component in this country. I have only to go and buy a semiconductor made by any of the well-known manufacturers, use it in some piece of equipment, and it renders them liable, as I see it, for having assisted in committing that offence. I would suggest that very serious consideration be given to Clause 7 on Committee stage.

4.28 p.m.

BARONESS PHILLIPS

My Lords, I think we can all agree that at any rate the objects of the Bill have been welcomed in our debate this afternoon. There have been various different views about achieving the objects of the Bill, not, I am glad to say, as many as I had anticipated, and it has been a pleasure to listen to the very factual and practical suggestions that have come from your Lordships.

If I may reply first to the noble Earl, Lord Shannon, my right honourable friend the Postmaster General has at all stages been very closely in touch with the radio amateurs through the Radio Society of Great Britain. He has on several occasions in the other place, and also in Committee stage, given categorical assurances that he will move throughout the whole of this in very close consultation with that society, and I think perhaps I could not give the noble Earl a better assurance than that. They have had dealings with the Postmaster General, and they have on every occasion expressed the feeling that he is very well aware of their remarkable interest.

I would remind your Lordships that this clause in particular is in the nature of a consumer protection clause. I feel certain that the noble Lord, Lord Airedale, appreciates that point. Young men do buy this sort of apparatus, which is very freely advertised for sale, on which in very small print it says, "Cannot be used in the United Kingdom". We are all aware that the shopper should beware, but I think your Lordships would agree that anything which helps to protect the consumer, as in fact this Bill would as a piece of protective legislation, is all to the good. But the radio amateurs are a different group, and also there is already properly licensed use of pieces of equipment which are used, for example within a hospital. Those are the kinds of equipment which do not cause interference, and this is used as a rigid criterion by my right honourable friend.

As I had rather expected, the noble Lord, Lord Airedale, brought forward one of the few points on which I appear to have no information at all; namely, why we still continue to call this wireless telegraphy. Being a non-technical Minister I might venture to suggest that at any rate one clause of the Bill does deal with apparatus which transmits and receives—this is the one which we have just been discussing—and therefore that would not be covered if we were to call it merely a Television Bill. Clause 7 does not deal with television; neither does the clause dealing with the vehicle excise licence. So perhaps the phrase "wireless telegraphy" is used as an all-over and comprehensive title.

LORD AIREDALE

My Lords, I suggested "Television and Radio Bill".

BARONESS PHILLIPS

My Lords, I should not like to take issue with the noble Lord on that matter. But again, I think that Clause 7 does not deal purely with radio. I will certainly go into the matter. I would agree that in these days we scarcely ever make reference to "wireless telegraphy". But I will come back to this point as I feel certain that the noble Lord will return to it on Committee.

I was glad that the noble Lord, Lord Denham, made reference to the fact that other means of raising finance had been suggested in another place, and therefore he did not reiterate the point. For those of your Lordships who have the time and the desire, I would recommend the reading of those suggestions, as they were indeed most interesting. My right honourable friend the Postmaster General has at all stages of the Bill taken full note of the knowledgeable people who have been putting forward these suggestions.

I would say that the burden on the small shopkeeper has been most carefully considered. In fact, my right honourable friend has consulted with the trade representatives, not once but on frequent occasions, and the instructions are the result of joint consultation. The suggestion of a record book seemed to me an admirable one, and I will certainly take this back. On the question of colour television, the noble Lord, Lord Denham, suggested that perhaps it was not fully appreciated whether there would be an additional fee. This information is required, because it is anticipated that colour television sets will be much more readily acquired as the prices appear to be coming down a little. In the original White Paper on Broadcasting issued in December last, the fact that there would be an additional fee of £5 was mentioned. However, I agree with the noble Lord that for the record it is necessary that we should repeat it in this House, so that those who do not already know can be made fully aware of the fact.

I would also repeat something that has not been raised by any noble Lord, but I think it is necessary to mention it. On studying the work of the detector vans it has seemed to me that it is sometimes thought that these are just a piece of bluff. I have heard many people outside this House say that they cannot really detect anything. On discussing this subject with Post Office officials, I was most interested to learn that in fact the detector vans are highly efficient and can be said to detect at wide range, almost down to the actual room and place in which the television set is operating.

I hope I have replied to the points raised by the three noble Lords who have taken part in this discussion. I am quite certain that we are going to have some useful discussion again on Committee. Therefore I would commend this Bill to your Lordships for a Second Reading.

On Question, Bill read 2a, and committed to a Committee of the Whole House.

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