If you’ve set up your household to legally avoid the TV licence fee – avoiding the BBC, sticking to Netflix, HBO Max and on-demand only – the government is reportedly considering making you pay it anyway.
Industry sources have told The Times that the government is cooling on the idea of funding the BBC through adverts or a subscription model, and is instead leaning towards expanding the licence fee to cover streaming households.
The government hasn’t confirmed any of this yet.
This isn’t entirely new – back in January 2025, we reported that the government was already looking at this as one of several options.
But The Times‘ sources suggest things have moved on since then. Rather than just one idea among many, the government is now said to be actively sympathetic to the BBC’s own proposal to extend the fee – and the BBC’s early talks with the Department for Culture, Media and Sport are described as going well.
The TV Licence Is Losing Its Grip
Right now, you need a TV licence if you watch or record any live television from any broadcaster – not just the BBC – or if you use BBC iPlayer.
If you only watch on-demand content from services like Netflix, HBO Max, or Amazon’s Prime Video, you don’t need one (remember that you do need a licence if you watch any live content on Netflix, Disney+, etc., such as live sports).
The fee currently stands at £180 per year, following an increase in April. And while that might not sound like a crisis, the BBC is losing licence fee payers at an alarming rate.
Evasion – households that should be paying but aren’t – now stands at a record 12.52%, costing the BBC around £550 million a year.
On top of that, 3.6 million households have legally declared they don’t need a licence because they genuinely don’t watch live TV or use BBC iPlayer. If all those households were paying, it would be worth another £617 million.
Put those two figures together and the BBC is missing out on over £1.1 billion a year – more than a quarter of its total licence fee income. The total number of licences in force has fallen to 23.8 million, down 2.4 million since the peak in 2017/18.
A Funding Model Under Pressure
The BBC’s real-terms income from the licence fee has fallen by around 25% over the past decade – a combination of falling licence numbers, the decision to transfer free licences for over-75s from the taxpayer to the licence fee payer, and a two-year freeze on the fee during a period of high inflation.
The corporation has already been forced into a £500 million savings plan, which is expected to result in around 2,000 job losses over the next two years.
Doorstep enforcement, meanwhile, has essentially stopped working. TV Licensing conducted nearly 2 million visits to unlicensed households in 2024/25 – a 50% increase on the previous year – and yet prosecutions for licence fee evasion have fallen by around 80% since 2019.
People simply aren’t opening their doors anymore.
Part of the reason is that there’s now a perfectly legitimate reason why someone might own a television and not need a licence.
If you only watch on-demand content on Netflix or ITVX, you genuinely don’t need one – which makes it much harder for a visiting officer to build a case against anyone.
The cost of all this enforcement isn’t cheap either. Collection and enforcement expenses jumped to £166 million in 2024/25, up from £143 million the year before.
Why Not Just Use Adverts Or A Subscription?
Both options have been discussed at length, but neither has much support from the people who matter.
The BBC itself has consistently rejected both. Former Director-General Tim Davie argued that advertising or subscription would undermine the BBC’s ability to serve everyone, not just those who can afford to pay or choose to subscribe.
BBC Chairman Dr Samir Shah made similar arguments, warning that both models would shift the focus from serving British audiences to profiting from them.
The government has its own concerns. Allowing the BBC to carry advertising could seriously damage ITV and Channel 4, which are already under financial pressure – the total TV advertising market has already shrunk from £5.1 billion in 2018 to £4.9 billion in 2023.
Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy has also expressed caution about subscriptions, saying the BBC’s ability to “unite the nation” could be undermined by putting content behind a paywall.
There’s also the numbers problem. The BBC has previously estimated that an equivalent subscription bundle – covering its ad-free video, audio and news services – could theoretically cost consumers more than £580 a year.
That’s more than triple the current licence fee. No wonder a subscription model doesn’t look particularly attractive to anyone.
So What Is The BBC Actually Proposing?
In its response to the government’s Charter Review Green Paper, published in March, the BBC argued that the problem isn’t so much the licence fee itself – it’s that the rules about who needs to pay are stuck in the era of live television.
The current fee is triggered by watching live TV from any broadcaster or using BBC iPlayer. But as more people shift to on-demand viewing, the pool of households that technically need a licence keeps shrinking – even if they’re still watching BBC content, listening to BBC Radio, or using BBC News online.
The BBC’s proposed solution is essentially to broaden who pays while potentially reducing how much each household pays.
The idea being that bringing more homes into the system – including streaming-only households – could allow the annual fee to come down, making it more affordable and harder to justify opting out of.
As the BBC put it in its Charter Review response: “The precise set of rules that require households to be licensed no longer reflect typical audience behaviour among many households in the UK.”
Other countries have taken a similar approach. Germany and Austria converted their licence fees into universal household charges, where every household contributes regardless of what they watch. Finland linked the charge to personal income.
What About iPlayer Enforcement?
One idea that’s been discussed is using BBC iPlayer logins to catch people who aren’t paying – since you have to create an account to use it, the BBC could theoretically match account holders against the licence fee database and block access for non-payers.
Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee explicitly recommended this approach back in November, and it sounds straightforward on paper.
But the BBC’s own Charter Review response was sceptical about how much difference it would actually make.
While around 80% of households that evade the licence fee do use iPlayer, fewer than 5% use it exclusively. Almost all evaders are also watching live TV – which means blocking their iPlayer access wouldn’t stop them doing other things that require a licence anyway.
The BBC hasn’t ruled out digital enforcement entirely, but it’s clear that locking iPlayer alone wouldn’t fix the problem.
What Happens Next?
The Charter Review consultation closed on March 10, 2026.
The government is now working through the responses and is expected to publish a White Paper later this year, setting out its actual proposals.
A draft Charter will then be debated in Parliament before the current one expires on December 31, 2027, with a new Charter due to take effect on January 1, 2028.
So nothing is decided yet, and the government hasn’t confirmed any of what The Times is reporting. But the direction of travel seems fairly clear – the question of whether streaming-only households should contribute something towards the BBC is no longer really “if”, but “how”.
What that means in practice – whether it’s a flat fee, a reduced charge, or something tied to income – remains to be seen.
One streaming industry source quoted by The Times wasn’t exactly enthusiastic: “It’s pretty desperate to argue that everyone should be made to pay for the BBC whether they watch it or not.”
Whether you agree with that or not probably depends on how much BBC content you actually use – and whether you think a publicly funded broadcaster that almost everyone dips into at some point is worth paying for, even if it’s not your first choice for a Friday night.
The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport told The Times: “The government does not comment on speculation. We are reviewing responses to the BBC Charter Review consultation and will set out our decisions in a white paper to be published later this year.”
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TV licence fee would be OK if streaming actually worked! We have a 900mb/s download broadband speed, an LG tv and a Freesat 4K box. Ch 5 cannot play anything – error code VJS-2999! As a pensioner, tv over the airwaves just worked. This streaming nonsense is pathetic, especially as Ch5 offers troubleshooting tips! Why? They have IT specialists on £100k/year managing their output! They need to fix it. It’s not for me to do it for free! So no licence fee until they make streaming work all the time. Period.
The potential forcing the licence fee on everyone is all about not allowing the BBC final salary pension scheme (pre 2010), not to go into default. The future final salary pension payment promises are eye watering. The government will not pay for the shortfall.
Therefore the BBC final salary scheme will have to be dealt with, by the PPS (pension protection scheme), with shortfalls in pension payments for every scheme member.
Ohh dear BBC, your time is over, the gravy train is at an end.
The British public will not allow forcing to pay the licence fee, when not consuming BBC content.
With the rise of Reform, it would never get through parliament.
The BBC are finished in their current form.
A perfect description, and I couldn’t agree more. But with Nandy, a BBC lover and a Labour government, I wouldn’t trust them an inch.
The thing that gets me is that it’s just too expensive for what it is, firstly they’re supposed to have an output of brilliant tv programmes documentaries sport and news, where exactly, I go the tv guide (yes I still buy one) I check through it to see what programmes I want to record during the week, I can honestly say that I haven’t recorded any bbc content for the last 3/4 years, and that’s no exaggeration, have you seen the schedule it’s full of daytime rubbish ie cooking gardening or antiques programmes, who the hell watches them, I sure as hell don’t, they don’t have any sport worth watching, ok they have the FA Cup, but that’s once a year, I’ve heard they’re going to lose Wimbledon pretty soon, the rugby well that’s gone, so if you watch pub games ie darts and snooker you’ll be ok,they bring out a decent drama every couple of months or so, most programming is ultra woke leftie biased lgbtq alphabet soup diversity crap, which I don’t watch, Lisa Mandy that they don’t want to undermine the bbc because it unites the country, well in my book they divide the country, they’re nothing more than a government mouth piece, I for one will cancel Netflix prime video , Disney Apple TV paramount and hbo max and go back to just watching blu rays if they do this, when are they going to open their eyes and just have bbc1 bbc 2 and bbc news with adverts, scrap everything else, then have iPlayer as a subscription say for £6.99/£7.99 a month, but no they’ve had it their way for too long, the BBC’s is a dinosaur in the modern digital world, they’re so out of touch with what people really want, to get back to the main point the licence fee is far to expensive for people like myself, especially as I don’t watch bbc content, all my other subscriptions I use every day,the bbc is done if they push ahead with this.
Of course lets not forget the new ‘citizens’ of the UK who are here on working visa’s or granted asylum and have no interest in paying for a tax to watch TV. There are videos online with them saying such. They think it’s a joke that they have to pay it as they don’t where they arrive from.
So this is aimed at the 3.6 million house holds who have legitimately opted out. How many of those can’t afford it, don’t have tvs are disabled or live in black spots. Would be interesting to know. How will it be implemented, if I dip into Netflix for a month for £6 do I trigger the whole year fee or £15 for that month(yep over twice the amount for nadda) . Will any of the streaming services whom the govt are making money on the back off sit and take it or ask (court action) for a slice. People have a choice as to what they want to watch don’t punish them for doing so.
You would think that in light of the government’s lack of popularity,it would be political suicide especially with younger voters .The other reason for Successive Governments continuing with supporting the BBC is down to political influence,if they hold the purse strings then whatever party is in it gives them influence over the messaging.It’s a myth that the BBC is unbiased and above party politics.
It’s true that holding the purse strings gives the government political influence over the B.B.C., and that applies regardless of the type of funding, as long as it remains a public service broadcaster.
But the government even has influence over commercial broadcasters, through laws and regulations. In any country, nothing is truly independent.
If any broadcaster is funded by subscription, it becomes a commercial broadcaster. So, if the B.B.C. is funded by subscription, it becomes a state-owned commercial broadcaster. And in that case, it should be privatised, and become a fully commercial broadcaster.
Even then, as stated above, the government would still have some influence over it.
The best solution is that the B.B.C. should be funded out of general taxation. That would take into account ability to pay, and create a downwards pressure on the B.B.C.’s budget. The B.B.C. would then remain a public service broadcaster, and over time it would become the broadcasting equivalent of the government’s official publisher (the stationery office).
As for all other broadcasters, Britain should move to a purely commercial broadcasting landscape. Including the privatisation of Channel Four.
We need a mass movement of people declaring no compliance. we won’t pay for this forced tax. I don’t consume BBC content. I don’t watch TV at all any more. And as far as I am concerned, Netflix and YouTube etc, aren’t UK companies. This to me amounts to being hijacked and robbed. I’m struggling financially as it is.
The German household levy is easily enforced. Its justification is that the entire nation benefits from having ARD/ZDF, regardless of whether the inidividual householder watches or listens.
This might be true because there isn’t that much global content out there in the German language. Germans are generally willing to pay, like they do with “Church Tax,” because of national culture, higher incomes, more generous pensions etc.
Porting this over to the UK would create all sorts of problems.
https://www.rundfunkbeitrag.de/welcome/english
I was watching on BBC1 this morning and switched through BBC2 and they were showing an almost identical live broadcast from 10 Downing st.
Only difference was the reporters almost elbow to elbow with the other channels team???
Talk about waste if they wanted to save money that should be their first target.
You often get news items on the local news and if that becomes national news they have national reporters reporting from the same location exactly the same news?? WHY??
If this happens, the TVs are going in the bin, I’ve had enough of this puneny government telling us what we should and should bit do, I am never going to support a corporation who cannot protect our children from abuse.
In an era of streaming it does feel slightly odd that the TV licence number (or a code linked to it) doesn’t have to be entered for accounts on iPlayer or any streaming service that’s capable of showing live content.
Legislation could potentially require require streaming services to only allow accounts to live content if this had been provided on the account, and somehow verified. They could also specify that it only applies to streaming services with a minimum number of UK paid subscribers (e.g. 1M), so as to avoid small streaming platforms from being affected.
This might encourage more people to pay for the licence fee if they’re watching live content on streaming platforms. It would also likely make enforcement easier, as they’d have user details from those services linked to a licence fee number/code.
A perfect answer, and a brilliant one at that, unfortunately, the good old BBC will never go for it, as I for one would still never pay their tax, and would be quite happy to never watch live TV again, along with thousands upon thousands of others.
Instantly unsubscribing Netflix and Prime if this proceed.
I do not understand the logic of this idea. To watch Netflix, on any device, you do not use any resource provided by the BBC, so why have to give BBC any money?
Ah yes pay for a service you aren’t using or wish to use, only in this age and government would it make any sense. I also can’t wait to pay for insurance on everyone else’s vehicle and make sure I pay extortionate national insurance on my wage to make sure my money is shared amongst those that don’t want to work…oh wait I already do those
It’s good that you finally recognise there is such a thing as lawful TVL avoidance, but you persist in repeating the false claim that failure to declare NLN constitutes illegal evasion.
A small household charge for transmission and broadband infrastucture might be acceptable, but some of us will not pay for the BBC, end of.
Another reason, if you needed one to get rid of this government ASAP. I like the bit about the government is cooling to the idea of subscription, that might be because the BBC would collapse completely inside 6 month’s.