MPs’ TV Licence Plan Could Force Millions More To Pay

Millions of UK homes that don’t currently need a TV Licence could soon have to pay for one.

A committee of MPs has recommended that, as early as 2028, the licence should stop depending on whether you watch live TV or BBC iPlayer – and it could apply even if you don’t own a TV at all.

The recommendation comes from the cross-party Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, which published its report on the BBC’s future today.

Right now, a household that only watches Netflix, Disney+ or YouTube on demand doesn’t need a licence. There are 3.7 million homes that have formally told TV Licensing exactly that.

Under the committee’s plan, those homes would pay too – in return, MPs say, for a cheaper licence for everyone.

The idea is often described as extending the licence beyond TV sets. But the licence already covers your phone and laptop. What would really change is which kind of viewing counts.

So, what are MPs actually proposing, why does it look a lot like the household tax the government has ruled out, what is the catch in that promised price cut, and – is the government likely to even listen to these recommendations?

What You Pay For Today

First, a quick reminder of how the licence works right now, because it’s not quite what most people think.

You need a TV Licence – currently £180 a year – if you watch or record live TV on any channel, through any service, or if you use BBC iPlayer at all. That includes live TV on streaming services like ITVX, Sky Go, YouTube, Prime Video or Netflix.

It doesn’t matter what you watch it on. A phone, a laptop, a games console and a Fire TV Stick all count, exactly like a TV set. So the licence already isn’t “just for TVs”.

What matters is what you watch. If you only ever watch on-demand programmes, and never touch BBC iPlayer, you don’t need a licence – even if you have the biggest telly on your street.

That’s the gap the committee wants to close.

What MPs Actually Want

The committee’s central recommendation is that the government should “broaden the scope of the licence fee in time for the start of the new Royal Charter in January 2028.”

The Royal Charter is the BBC’s constitutional rulebook, renewed roughly every decade. The current one runs out on December 31, 2027, and the government is now deciding what goes into the next one.

Then comes this: “At a minimum, the reformed fee should no longer be linked to a particular device or activity.”

The important word is “activity”. Watching live TV and using iPlayer are the activities that trigger the licence today. Take that link away and what you watch, or whether you watch anything, stops being the test.

MPs were told that a reformed licence “would capture more households as it would include watching video on demand.”

So in practice:

• Today: a home that only streams on-demand Netflix, Disney+ or YouTube pays nothing to the BBC.
• Under the committee’s plan: that home pays, because the fee would no longer depend on watching live TV or iPlayer.
• No TV at all? The committee doesn’t spell out exactly what would trigger the new fee. But one proposal it quotes, from the campaign group the British Broadcasting Challenge, would tie it to a household’s ability to watch live video on “a mobile phone or a tablet”, not just a television. A fee linked to no particular device and no particular activity leaves very few households outside it.

That’s a big change for the people it affects – and there are a lot of them. Alongside those 3.7 million “No Licence Needed” declarations, the BBC’s own figures showed the number of licences fell by 539,000 in a single year, with most of those households simply cancelling and never telling anyone.

Those are exactly the homes this plan would bring back.

The report also notes that, according to some of its evidence, fewer than 40% of UK households would be paying for a TV Licence by 2037/38 if current trends continue.

A Household Tax By Another Name?

When the government launched its Charter Review consultation last December, it said it was “not considering replacing” the licence fee with “a new tax on households”.

Countries like Germany, Switzerland and Austria fund their public broadcasters that way – every household pays, whatever it watches – and the government was clear it didn’t want to go there.

The trouble is that a licence fee linked to no device and no activity is very hard to tell apart from exactly that – and one of the committee’s own expert witnesses said so.

Professor Maria Michalis, a professor of communication policy at the University of Westminster, told MPs that a “universal licence fee that is device, technology and transmission independent” was “essentially a form of household levy”.

The committee itself goes further than the government on this. It says there are “strong arguments” for a household levy and that the government “should not have ruled out this option entirely”, but that it would be too difficult to introduce quickly.

Its recommended route is to reform the licence fee first, and keep the levy in mind for later.

The BBC is keen. Director-General Matt Brittin told MPs a levy would save the corporation about £190 million a year in collection costs, and could open the door to a lower fee and discounts for lower-income households or younger viewers, if it brought in enough extra money.

Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy is less so. Giving evidence in July, she said a levy was “much simpler” but “potentially more regressive”, adding: “At a time when the cost of living is biting for a lot of people, I think a new tax on households is too challenging to ask most families to accept, so we are looking at a range of options for how we could potentially expand the scope.”

In other words, the Culture Secretary is already looking at how to expand who pays. She just doesn’t want to call it a tax.

And how would a household charge even be collected? The report mentions adding it to council tax (described by one witness as “probably the least popular tax that has been introduced”), or to your broadband or utility bill.

It also notes that Germany took 12 years of discussion to agree its version. The committee wants the first step in place in about 15 months.

The Cheaper Licence Comes With A Catch

The good news, on paper, is that the committee doesn’t want this to be a straightforward money grab. If more households pay, it says, the individual fee should go down.

The report says broadening the licence “would be an easier sell to licence fee payers if expanding the base is paired with a drop in the individual cost”, and makes that a condition of its recommendation.

But read the whole sentence. The price cut should happen “as long as doing so does not reduce the sustainability of the BBC’s income and ability to fulfil its public purposes.”

That’s quite a big “as long as”. The BBC ran a £121 million deficit last year, its third losing year in a row, and the report itself says the aim of broadening the licence is to “lead to an increase in revenue”. A cut that only happens if the BBC can afford it could end up being a very small cut.

Nobody has put a figure on it yet.

Who Would Actually Enforce It?

There’s another question the report doesn’t answer: if Netflix-only households have to pay, how would anyone know who they are?

The companies you’d think might help have already said no. COBA, the trade body for commercial broadcasters and on-demand services, told the committee its members “should not be required to enforce the licence fee on behalf of the BBC”. ITV and Sky both said the same.

That echoes what the Hollywood studios told the same inquiry back in June. Their trade body, which represents Netflix, Disney, Amazon and others, said it didn’t want streamers policing the licence fee through data-sharing, pop-up warnings or blocking content.

Evidence quoted in the report does point to one future route. Once TV moves entirely onto the internet, MPs were told, the BBC could make you log in to iPlayer and “withhold access to those who have not paid the licence fee.”

That links directly to the government’s plan to switch off Freeview, with 2034 as its preferred date and 2044 as the alternative.

Today, locking iPlayer wouldn’t achieve much, because anyone shut out can still watch BBC One through an aerial. Once the aerial goes, that changes.

Yet on the switch-off date itself, the committee takes no position. It says it has “not examined these arguments in detail”. All it adds is that, whichever date is chosen, the switch-off can only happen once things like affordable broadband are in place.

So, Will The Government Actually Listen?

It’s a fair question, because this committee isn’t the government – even though the names sound almost identical.

The Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), run by Lisa Nandy, is the government department that will actually write the new Charter.

The committee is a group of MPs from different parties whose job is to keep an eye on that department and on the BBC. It can question ministers and BBC bosses, collect evidence and publish recommendations. It can’t make the government do any of it.

What it can do is make the government respond. By convention, ministers reply to committee reports in writing, “if possible” within two months – though that deadline is often missed.

The committee’s track record on the licence fee is mixed. Back in March 2021, it said the licence fee should stay until at least 2038, as the best of the available options.

Ten months later, then-Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries froze the fee for two years and tweeted that “this licence fee announcement will be the last.” The MPs were ignored.

And yet here we are in 2026, with the licence fee still alive and the debate now about how to stretch it, not scrap it.

This time, the committee is mostly pushing at an open door. Nandy has already said she’s looking at expanding who pays. She told MPs she’s “keen that we remove the political appointments” from the BBC board – another of the report’s recommendations.

And in March, she announced the government would end what she called the “bizarre situation” where the BBC ceases to exist if a new Charter isn’t agreed in time, which is close to the committee’s call for a permanent Charter with no end date.

Nandy also kept her job when Andy Burnham replaced Keir Starmer as Prime Minister over the summer, so the person who gave that evidence in July is the same person who’ll make the decision.

So on the part that matters most to your wallet, this report looks like a fairly good preview of where the government is already heading. The real answer comes in the government’s White Paper, which is due later this year.

That Remote Control Button Again

One more recommendation is worth a mention, mostly because we’ve heard it before.

The committee wants the government to pass a law putting a button on every smart TV remote sold in the UK, taking you straight to the public service broadcasters – the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, 5 and the rest. Netflix and Amazon already pay TV makers for buttons of their own.

This isn’t a new idea. The BBC asked for an iPlayer button on every streaming device remote back in June 2023, in evidence to the same committee of MPs.

At the time, the government said remote controls weren’t covered by what became the Media Act.

Three years on, the committee is backing the idea itself – and widening it, from an iPlayer button to a shortcut for all the public service broadcasters.

What the committee doesn’t say is whether that would include Freely, the free live TV service that’s meant to replace Freeview. A button that takes you to a single live TV guide is a very different thing from one that opens iPlayer.

What Else Is In The Report

The report’s other main recommendations are:

Stop overpaying for US shows: MPs say the BBC shouldn’t outbid commercial UK broadcasters for imports like Suits, Schitt’s Creek and Scooby Doo. Brittin told them overseas programmes make up less than 5% of the BBC’s content budget, but said he’d look at it again.

No paywall for older iPlayer shows: the committee rejected charging UK viewers for older programmes on iPlayer, though it wants an independent assessment of other ways to make money from them.

Channel 4 inside iPlayer: MPs “strongly support” opening iPlayer up to other public service broadcasters, after the BBC confirmed it was in talks with Channel 4.

Why old shows are missing from iPlayer: much of the BBC’s back catalogue is owned by the independent production companies that made it, not the BBC. MPs want both sides to talk about “rebalancing” the rights.

A permanent Charter: no more end date every ten years – an idea BBC chair Samir Shah floated back in 2024.

The World Service: MPs want the government to take back paying for it, after the BBC spent £234 million on it last year.

What It Means For You

For now, nothing changes. The licence is £180 a year, with one more inflation-linked rise already scheduled for April 2027, and the rules about who needs one are exactly the same as they were yesterday.

The government’s White Paper is due later this year, and the new Charter is set to start on January 1, 2028.

If the government follows the committee’s lead – and the Culture Secretary’s own words suggest it’s heading that way – the bottom line looks like this:

• If you already pay, you might end up paying a little less. But there’s no figure, and the cut only happens if the BBC can afford it.
• If you’ve legally stopped paying because you only stream on demand, that option is likely to disappear, quite possibly from 2028.
• How anyone would check, and who would do the checking, is still unanswered – and it may depend on what happens to the aerial on your roof.

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