Other audience research
A part of our work is guided by our responsibilities to licence fee payers. This section includes research on the way that the BBC Trust engages with the public and the ways that the licence fee is collected.
Licence fee collection
As part of its responsibility to get the best out of the BBC for licence fee payers, the BBC Trust is responsible for overseeing the licence fee collection arrangements put in place by BBC management and ensuring that they are "efficient, appropriate and proportionate". The BBC Trust is charged with agreeing the collection strategy on an annual basis, however it will also conduct a more in-depth and wide-ranging review on how the licence fee is collected periodically and it carried out the first of these in 2008. The BBC Trust commissioned a piece of qualitative research focusing on the experiences and perceptions of certain key audiences who it hypothesised may have had particular experiences in relation to TV Licensing as a result of their particular circumstances. The areas concerned in the research were largely those covered in the public consultation, although some issues were explored in more depth with specific audiences.
Licence fee collection
Audience engagement
The Royal Charter requires the BBC Trust to publish a protocol which outlines how it will actively seek the views of, and engage with, licence fee payers, and to consult on these plans. A draft protocol was developed and used as the basis of the BBC Trust Audience Engagement Consultation, which ran from 14 May to 03 August 2007, and included an open consultation questionnaire and qualitative and quantitative research. This report summarises the findings of the quantitative research, conducted among 2,060 adults.
Our Promise To You: How the Trust will engage with audiences
