If a UK household goes without a TV licence it needs, the usual consequence is a knock on the door from a TV Licensing Enquiry Officer. If that goes badly, the case can end in prosecution and a criminal conviction. In 2020, 52,376 people were convicted of licence fee evasion.

The system is under strain. In 2024 officers made nearly 2m visits to unlicensed homes, half as many again as the year before, yet prosecutions fell by 17%.

What the licence fee is

The fee is an annual charge, set at £174.50 when BBC News reported on it in April 2025. It is the BBC’s main source of money. In the last financial year it brought in £3.7bn, about two-thirds of the corporation’s income.

The duty to pay rests on the BBC’s charter, an agreement with the government that sets out what the BBC is for. The current charter runs out in 2027 and is under review. According to the BBC, 80% of households pay.

What happens if you don’t pay

Enforcement has long rested on household visits. Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee (PAC) described doorstep calls as the traditional method.

The outcome has fallen harder on some people than others. Women made up 76% of those convicted in 2020, and in 2023 the BBC set out plans to bring that share down. A BBC review in 2017 put the skew down to social factors. Households of women only were more common among cases, and women were more likely to answer the door and talk to an officer.

Why the visits have stopped working

The PAC reported in November 2025 that the extra visits had produced neither more licence sales nor more successful prosecutions. BBC executives told MPs the growing problem was householders who simply do not open the door. The BBC said it had become harder to get an answer than five years earlier, and that it had shifted to an approach led by marketing. Prosecutions have been in long-term decline since 2017, the committee noted.

The money at stake is large. The committee put the evasion rate at 12.5%, worth up to £550m a year. A further 3.6m households now declare they need no licence because they don’t watch BBC content, up from 2.4m in 2021. That costs up to £617m in potential fees. Together, MPs said, the BBC is losing more than £1bn a year.

Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, the Conservative MP who chairs the committee, said the ground was “shifting beneath the BBC’s feet”. The committee wants collection and enforcement methods suited to monitoring online viewing.

Could the rules change?

Culture secretary Lisa Nandy called the fee “unenforceable” in an April 2025 interview with the Daily Telegraph. She said fewer and fewer people were paying, and that she had been concerned by the way vulnerable women had been targeted for enforcement in the past.

Nandy has also called the charge “deeply regressive”. The BBC’s own chairman suggested in a Sunday Times interview that wealthier households could pay more.

Critics argue the fee is harder to defend as younger viewers spend their time on YouTube and TikTok. BBC executives counter that a licence fee, or something close to it, is the only way to keep a service meant for everyone.

Nandy has ruled out funding the BBC from general taxation but left open the option of a subscription. A BBC spokesperson told the Guardian that the licence fee needs reform, and that any change must keep the BBC a universal public broadcaster. Nandy has said no options are off the table in the government’s review of how the BBC is funded.