At the end of January 2021, following an eight-week consultation in 2020, the government announced that it would not go ahead with plans to decriminalise non-payment of TV licences. This is despite the culture secretary, Oliver Dowden, having acknowledged “the considerable stress and anxiety it can cause for individuals, including for the most vulnerable in society, such as older people”.
This decision may be a relief to some people, given the politicised atmosphere in which the consultation was carried out. In the run-up to the 2019 general election, cabinet ministers boycotted Radio 4’s Today programme after complaining of bias. When the Tories were returned with an increased majority, the new government seemed to want to send a signal to the BBC that it wasn’t untouchable; its first official announcement was that it would look into decriminalising non-payment of the licence fee.
Yet while the government’s plans provoked outrage in some quarters about the threat to a cultural icon, this is actually a case of Goliath versus Goliath. For many, the annual fee of £159 (announced last week) is a minor household bill, but non-payment results in criminal convictions for more than 100,000 people a year. Perhaps most shockingly, TV licensing offences disproportionately involve women, who in 2019 made up a whopping 74% of people convicted of non-payment in the UK – though only 49% of licence holders are women.
