Freedom of Information: numerical junk via the BBC

Thanks to a Free­dom of Inform­a­tion request through great new site whatdotheyknow.com, you can get a rough idea of which UK ‘nation’ paid what for the BBC, as of March 31, 2008.

It’s pretty precise:

Coun­try      #licences rev­enue   %con­trib.  %pop (2006)
Eng­land      20.415m   £2,870m  83.1%        83.8%
Scot­land     2.178m     £306m     8.9%          8.4%
Wales         1.235m     £173m     5.0%          4.9%
N Ire­land    0.624m     £89m       2.6%          2.9%
Chan­nel Is. 0.092m     £13m       0.4%

The Chan­nel Islands aren’t included in the NSS pop­u­la­tion estim­ates, but it is extraordin­ary how the dis­tri­bu­tion of TV licences almost exactly matches pop­u­la­tion distribution.

That’s because, I would sug­gest, these fig­ures are rub­bish. Ah yes, says the BBC let­ter, they are ‘an approx­im­a­tion’. It looks like Cap­ita, who admin­is­ter the licence fee, just used UK pop­u­la­tion data to divide up the total and out­put this junk.

So this isn’t what each nation pays for the BBC. It’s just a numer­ical mush. Couldn’t the Inform­a­tion Com­mis­sioner require people to — as my old maths teacher used to say — ‘show their workings’?

(There are more BBC licence fee responses here.)

Tagged as: BBC, Freedom of Information, Ireland, Scotland, The Channel Islands, United Kingdom, Wales