Laura Slattery: An Post’s collection of TV licence fee less than ideal

David McRedmond has a “personal grá” for RTÉ, he said on Sunday — his late father and late sister worked for the broadcaster.

As long as he remains chief executive of An Post, he will also retain a business link to RTÉ. Although the former TV3 Group boss was eliminated from the RTÉ director general selection process the day after being interviewed in mid-March, a subject of massive importance to the State-owned broadcaster will continue to cross his desk.

That’s because Ireland is one of just three European countries with a television licence fee where the post office network is responsible for its collection — the others are Czech Republic, where it does so in conjunction with the public broadcaster, and Poland.

The Government hasn’t seemed especially minded to strip An Post of its role, held since the introduction of the charge in 1962

On this issue, the State is even more of an outlier in Europe than it is on its old-fashioned linking of the €160 licence fee to ownership of a traditional television set — a condition of eligibility to pay that grows increasingly antiquated with each passing year.

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And yet, while various Ministers have explored alternative arrangements and a technical working group was formed last year to “overhaul” the licence fee, the Government hasn’t seemed especially minded to strip An Post of its role, held since the introduction of the charge in 1962.

An Post, for its part, has seemed keen to keep the collection function, which brings payers who eschew online and telephone options into contact with their local post office and for which it is paid a commission by the Department of Communications.

The organisation has “long cherished” its status as collection agent, An Post wrote in its submission to the Future of Media Commission. It described its TV licence activities as “an important facet of our public service role” and “a key business for our post office network and postmasters” and suggested it had a “high level of expertise” in such operations.

RTÉ, the main recipient of the licence fee, has been rather less enamoured with An Post’s track record and has not exactly raced to absolve it of blame for an evasion rate estimated to have climbed above 15 per cent.

These two broad positions raise the intriguing, but now academic, question of whether McRedmond’s stance on An Post’s collection of the licence fee would have evolved had he made the move from Dublin 1 to Donnybrook.

But this is by no means a “two sides” situation. In its diagnosis of the licence fee malaise, An Post has defended itself but also echoed many of the concerns of RTÉ.

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Both organisations agree that the current funding model is “not robust enough”, as An Post puts it, to generate the funds required to support Irish public service media as a whole, that business premises should pay more than individual households and that the fee should not be dependent on ownership of any particular device.

Part of the problem, as An Post sees it, is that there are gaps in the broadcasting legislation that does not give it access to the data needed to improve the quality of the TV licence database. Revenue could be “optimised”, it argues, if it could avail of data from pay-TV providers, the ESB and Revenue.

One of the collection hurdles it faces is that it is often obliged to address easily ignored letters to “the Occupier” of unlicensed households. Knowing the name of the current resident of a property would be a “game changer”, it says.

[ McRedmond no longer interested in RTÉ role, says speculation over director general appointment ‘damaging’ ]

Another defence is that it has been disincentivised from investing in its systems because it has no long-term collection contract, only a rolling annual one. In 2019, when the then government signalled it would put a five-year collection contract out to public tender, it appeared to be responding to this argument rather than angling to award the contract elsewhere — it had already dismissed an Oireachtas media committee recommendation to allocate the responsibility to Revenue. In the end, no tender occurred.

Notwithstanding the thousands of court summons it issues for non-payment each year, An Post seems notably less enthusiastic about the enforcement side of its TV licence responsibilities, having proposed a system of surcharges in lieu of prosecutions to the Future of Media Commission.

So the knotty business of the licence fee remains in play, with a technical group examining the matter and reform pledged by the third quarter of 2024

The independent body’s report, published last July, didn’t mention An Post, recommending instead that the licence fee be scrapped entirely and replaced with direct exchequer funding of public media — a nuclear option nobody really wanted and the Government found easy to reject.

So the knotty business of the licence fee remains in play, with a technical group examining the matter and reform pledged by the third quarter of 2024. If McRedmond’s contract with An Post is extended beyond its expiry date later this year, conversations about the licence fee remain in his future.

For An Post, however, licence fee collection is ultimately one of many hustles. For RTÉ, it is a rather more central affair. The licence represents its biggest single source of funding — in 2021, it received €196.1 million from this avenue compared to €148.3 million in commercial revenues.

Notably, not all licence fee receipts come from direct sales from An Post. About €70 million of the €221 million total in 2021 came from the “other” source of such receipts — a contribution from the Department of Social Protection in respect of people who receive free licences through the Household Benefits Package, including all householders aged 70 and over.

Ironically, this age group, though not liable to pay the licence fee, is the one most loyal to RTÉ.

Thanks to Ireland’s ageing population, the volume of licence fee receipts that any agent can collect is primed to fall over time, putting pressure on the Government to either extend the net, crack down on evasion and/or pony up more money directly. A fourth option, to increase the rate of the fee, is unfair to those who pay.

A fifth — one McRedmond no longer has to worry about — is to force RTÉ to cut, cut, cut. The trouble is licence fee payers, and the over-70s audience, will eventually notice this one, too.