Reform ?

The language around the future of the tv licence fee has changed in the BBC Annual Report. No talk of alternative funding approaches but "We will proactively research how we might reform the licence fee to secure the benefits of a well-resourced, universal BBC of scale for the long term."

Some of that research will be about avoiding going to court as the final enforcement. The BBC reckons over half of 'evaders' actually use BBC content once a week. The estimated evasion rate for 2023/24 is 11.30% compared to 10.58% in the previous year. Evasion cost £466m over the year. Five years ago, in 2018, evasion was estimated at 7%.

In 2023-24, 3.3 million premises declared that they did not need a licence (2.8 million, 2022-23).  In 2023-24, as a proportion of licences sold, TVL took approximately 0.1% of people to court for licence fee evasion. In England and Wales in the year to December 2023 (the most recent data available), the courts convicted 30,900 people of licence fee evasion (40,700 in the year to December 2022).

Is the half-million drop in licence-fees in force scary ? It's not all cancellations (people die), but it's a figure that's rising.