The system of contracting out of state pensions – a form of pension privatisation – operated very successfully in the UK until recent years with cross-party support. This was very important in ensuring that the UK system of private pension provision was one of the most successful in the...

In the past, the use of a compulsory levy on television sets (a licence fee) to finance the BBC could be justified given the problem of spectrum scarcity and the fact that television signals were a public good (i.e. there was effectively a zero marginal cost of an additional user receiving the...