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.)