Licence fee evaders are shutting the door on inspectors – making viewers who do pay lose faith in the system
Faith in the licence fee will “ebb away” unless the BBC overhauls a failing enforcement system which cost the broadcaster £1.1bn in non-payment last year, MPs warned.
The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) said the BBC must urgently modernise a collection procedure which still relies on house visits.
The BBC has acknowledged that it has become harder to get people to answer their doors compared to five years ago, which limits the enforcement effectiveness.
Licence fee evasion and households not purchasing a licence together represented over £1.1bn in potential lost income in 2024–25, the PAC report into the BBC’s accounts found.
Evasion is now running at 12.5 per cent (£550m) with 3.6m households declaring they did not need a licence (£617 million).
Enforcement has traditionally relied on household visits but this approach is becoming less effective. Officers made 2 million visits to unlicensed homes last year, a 50 per cent increase on the previous year, but this did not translate into higher licence fee sales or successful prosecutions.
In fact, prosecutions fell by 17 per cent in the year to December 2024 compared to the year before, continuing a long-term decline since 2017.
‘The broadcaster will see faith in the licence fee system ebb away’
The PAC has said that “without visible enforcement, licence fee payers who do comply may start to question the fairness of the system.”
It’s report states that the BBC has “not adopted opportunities to digitise the licence fee, resulting in missed opportunities for cost efficiency.”
MPs told the BBC to “modernise licence fee collection and enforcement by developing and implementing approaches suited to monitoring online viewing.”
The BBC could make access to the iPlayer app on TVs, mobile and laptops conditional on paying a monthly charge. This would slash the rising £166m cost of sending letters and issuing paper licence fees.
But the BBC told the PAC that this was not currently practical.
Licences are linked to a household address instead of individual viewers. So the BBC can’t directly tie someone signed up to the iPlayer via their personal email address to a licence holder.
Because of its public service commitment to “universality”, the BBC is opposed to creating a paywall that would mean excluding some people from BBC News. The BBC said it was committed to increasing the number of digital non-paper licences, which are now running at 60 per cent.
PAC chairman Conservative MP Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown described the BBC as “an organisation under severe pressure”.
He said: “On the licence fee, our report makes clear that the ground is shifting beneath the BBC’s feet – the traditional enforcement method of household visits is seeing fewer and fewer returns at a time of heightened competition for almost every aspect of the BBC’s activities.
“Our report shows that without a modernised approach focused more on online viewing, the broadcaster will see faith in the licence fee system ebb away.”
‘All the BBC seems to be able to do is send threatening letters’
Silver Voices, the group representing older people, said a campaign of “non-cooperation” over paying the licence fee among the over-75s was now spreading to other age groups.
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Dennis Reed, Silver Voices director, said: “There are several hundred thousand people who previously had free licences who are still refusing to pay five years on. Enforcement is being made a mockery of by an unofficial amnesty for not paying.”
“All the BBC seems to be able to do is send threatening letters – one of our members has had 57 letters but there never seems to be an enforcement visit to follow. It encourages lot of other people who can’t afford to pay to say ‘we’re not going to get prosecuted so why pay it.’”
A BBC spokesperson said that they had made it clear to the PAC that the licence fee needs reform and that: “We are actively exploring all options that can make our funding model fairer, more modern and more sustainable, but we’ve been clear that any reform must safeguard the BBC as a universal public broadcaster”.
The BBC added that TV Licensing works hard to collect the licence fee and “enforce the law efficiently, fairly and proportionately” and pointed out that the National Audit Office reports that “we continue to successfully deliver on these measures”.
