This week the BBC announced that next year most over-75s will have to pay to watch television. This is a wrongheaded and mean policy forced upon the BBC by former Conservative chancellor George Osborne, who should not have been allowed to load the cost of his damaging social and economic policies on to the corporation. Even worse, the Conservative government has broken a 2017 election promise that the licence fee would remain free to pensioners over the age of 75 for the duration of this parliament. It is the politics of the absurd for Downing Street to ask the BBC to revisit a “disappointing” decision after forcing the broadcaster to enact a policy the Conservative party had promised it would block.

Unless the policy is reversed, the BBC will become a welfare agency that means-tests elderly people. It will be obliged to push through a cruel and unnecessary benefit cut that will affect 4.6m households which have no way of increasing their income to pay for it. Even taking into account those rich enough to pay and those exempted through pension credit, at least 2.5 million poor pensioners face an annual £150 bill. For more than a million of the oldest people in our country, television is their main form of company.

Mr Osborne’s licence fee wheeze was to compel the corporation to agree to shouldering the expense out of its own £4bn licence fee income. But handing out free licences would have placed an ever-growing burden on the BBC’s finances. If it were to allow over-75s to continue watching for free then the BBC would have to have found about half a billion pounds in savings. That figure alone should put pay to the idea that somehow a few celebrity salaries could be cut to fill the gap. Mr Osborne and his ilk in the Conservative party do not care one jot for the potential extraordinary reputational risk the BBC faces. Such Tories perhaps have never thought much of the idea of universal public services; cared little about enriching democratic debate and informing citizens; or about the cultural consumption patterns of the nation.

They perhaps could not see the problem if the BBC ends up taking a frail pensioner to court for not possessing a TV licence that for years they have had for free. This is a blindness brought on by ideology. This crude piece of politicking compromises the BBC’s independence. Of all the possible candidates for leadership of the Tory party, it seems only Sajid Javid’s team has understood this. This will not be lost on the Conservative members due to elect the next prime minister, who are likely to be closer to 75 than most of the population.

About half a million people have already signed the Age UK online petition demanding the government takes back responsibility for funding free TV licences. There is an obvious opportunity to do so. Although the funding of the free TV licence regime ends in June 2020, the government will begin discussing the BBC’s funding settlement in 2021. Any costs incurred because of the over-75 strategy by the corporation between June 2020 and April 2022, when the new licence fee begins, should be covered by the government without jeopardising BBC services.

From then onwards, if the state believes that pensioners should have free services, it ought to pay for them. The UK’s licence fee model, in which advertisements or subscription fees are not part of funding, is also present – but far more expensive – in Denmark and Norway. Britain’s media market is large enough to make investment here worthwhile, but not so big that there’s no reason to export. Netflix will set up a UK office; Apple TV will launch and Amazon is hiring. It’s true that the BBC can loom too large in parts of the media landscape, but it faces being shrunk by US media giants and a politics inimical to public service broadcasting.

• This article was amended on 17 June 2019 to remove an incorrect reference to Sweden having a similar licence model to the UK. Sweden replaced its TV and radio licence fee with a general public service fee on 1 January 2019.