Andrew Bridgen's campaign to stop people being treated as criminals for watching TV without a licence looks set to become law. Here, the Tory MP for North West Leicestershire says the support he has received shows he was right:
AS I drafted and submitted my amendment to the Deregulation Bill calling for non-payment of the TV Licence to be decriminalised, I did not expect that in three weeks and with the support of 150 backbench colleagues, it would have led to not only the Government adopting it as policy but also achieving full cross-party support.
After all, this was just one backbencher taking on the might of the BBC with its £3.8 billion budget and an army of PR staff.
However when an argument is right, even the BBC can be forced to back down and accept that criminalising and imprisoning people in this manner is not a sustainable option going forward.
I have been asked what has motivated me to mount this campaign. I think we have all seen the advertisements that the BBC has run with, in the past, threatening big fines or imprisonment for not paying the TV Licence, and it has always struck me as unfair that the State acts as the BBC's debt collector.
However as I looked into the matter further, I was shocked to discover that more than 180,000 people were prosecuted for non-payment in 2012 and more than 50 went to prison.
Many of those who went to prison are single mother's and The Shaw Trust has contacted me about the women it has visited in prison for this offence who have had to put their children into care.
All because they were too poor to pay the TV Licence in order to sustain the £295,000 salary of the BBC Director of Strategy and former Labour Culture Minister James Purnell or, indeed, the hundreds of thousands of pounds paid to some of its biggest stars through service companies to avoid tax.
When presented with these facts, there were very few colleagues on all sides of the House who thought it this was right.
The BBC threw everything they had at me, threatening the closure of local radio stations, BBC4 and most emotively of all CBeebies.
However in the end they accepted that there should be a review into this matter.
The proposals would require Culture Secretary Maria Miller to carry out a review of the sanctions for licence fee evasion, looking at the option of switching to a civil penalty system of fines.
This gives the BBC time to get its house in order and look at alternative ways of collecting its income that do not rely on criminalising the very poorest in our society.
I am proud that my campaign has resulted in a path to decriminalisation so this blot on our statute book can be permanently removed.
