Television licence fee to increase by £14.50

The Government has approved a television licence increase of £14.50 from next September. The new rates will be £84.50 for a colour television and £68.50 for a black and white set. Another possible increase will be considered in 18 months. RTÉ had been looking for a £50 increase.

The Minister for the Arts, Síle de Valera, told RTÉ this afternoon that the increase she proposed was an interim one, designed to enable RTÉ to maintain its current level of services without eliminating its cash reserve.

The Government has also agreed to consider a further increase from April 2003, subject to certain conditions. The Minister said: "Licence holders must be reassured that the licence fee revenue is well spent and that the RTÉ Authority meets its statutory obligations in the most cost-effective manner".

RTÉ said that it was very disappointed by the announcement and added that it raised very challenging questions for the organisation. In a statement, the company said that it believed its case for a £50 increase had been fully argued and justified and included a structure which would have provided continuity for the public funding of public service broadcasting. The implications of the decision would be considered by the RTÉ Authority at its next meeting, which had been brought forward to Friday.

Fine Gael's spokesman, Dinny McGinley, said that Minister de Valera had abdicated her responsibility to public service broadcasting. He said that she had left RTÉ with inadequate funding, and done nothing whatever about making RTÉ's expenditure of public funds accountable and transparent. Deputy McGinley said that the announcement was a "major set-back" for RTÉ's digital services.

Labour's Brian O'Shea called for the publication of the Price Waterhouse Cooper consultants' report. He warned that the increase fell far short of the £50 sought, and could have implications for programming and jobs. He claimed that Minister de Valera's handling of the application had been "unsatisfactory and inept".

The NUJ has described the licence fee increase as "scandalous". Eoin Ronayne, Irish Secretary of the NUJ, said that he was outraged, and that the RTÉ trade union group would have to meet to consider its implications. The loss of jobs over and above those agreed in the transformation process, he said, could be among the possible implications of the decision.

He said that the decision showed a lack of sensitivity and understanding for transformation, and it was illustrative of the Government putting political interest over public service broadcasting. The announced review in 2003 was, he said, effectively the "long fingering" of a critical problem.

Regarding the decision not to include programming and digital channels at this point, he said that RTÉ was already slow enough in entering the digital market, and that by 2003 it would be much too late.