The decision to hike the TV licence fee to £180 a year is an insult to millions of households who are already being squeezed from every direction.
This is not a small administrative adjustment. It is a compulsory charge for watching any live broadcast TV, enforced through the criminal law, imposed on people whether they watch the BBC or not.
At a time when families are cutting back on food, heating and essentials, the Government has chosen to protect the BBC by demanding more money from the public — and threatening them with fines and prosecution if they refuse.
Ministers claim the rise is “in line with inflation”, yet for many hardworking Britons, pay rarely keeps pace with inflation. The BBC should not have a divine right to automatic funding increases.
And tying the licence fee to the Consumer Prices Index simply hard-wires annual rises regardless of performance, trust or value for money.
Trust in the BBC is at an all-time low. Over the past year alone, the BBC has been engulfed in a series of serious editorial scandals that go directly to the heart of trust and accountability.
A Panorama documentary was found to have misleadingly edited Donald Trump’s January 6 speech, splicing together remarks made nearly an hour apart to create a false impression of incitement — triggering uproar across Parliament, public apologies from the BBC, and ultimately the resignations of the Director-General and the head of BBC News.
In Gaza coverage, the BBC aired a documentary narrated by the son of a senior Hamas official without disclosing that connection, leading Ofcom to rule the programme “materially misleading”, order an on-air apology, and force its removal from iPlayer.
And at Glastonbury, the BBC broadcast chants of “death to the IDF” during a live performance despite internal warnings, breaching its own harm and offence rules and prompting police involvement and a major change to live-broadcast policy.
These are not minor errors or isolated lapses — they are repeated failures of editorial judgment at the very top of an organisation that continues to demand compulsory funding from the public under threat of criminal prosecution. Yet while senior figures avoid consequences, the public is still expected to keep paying — or face criminal sanctions.
There is a silver lining to the BBC licence fee hike. The nuclear option is now unavoidable - Rebecca Ryan | Getty Images
And enforcement falls overwhelmingly on the most vulnerable. Around three-quarters of prosecutions for non-payment are against women, many of them working-class, single mothers or carers struggling to make ends meet.
For them, the licence fee is not an abstract debate about public broadcasting — it is a source of extreme stress, fines and a criminal record for failing to pay for a service they may not even use.
Internationally, the BBC’s funding model is now an outlier: a compulsory levy enforced through criminal law in a media market where choice is otherwise voluntary. Other countries have moved away from criminalisation or scrapped licence-style systems altogether.
Only the UK continues to treat non-payment for a media service as a criminal offence in a world of subscriptions and on-demand viewing.
The BBC’s own figures expose the scale of public rejection. It lost more than £1billion in a single year. One in eight households now refuses to pay the licence fee. And the response from the BBC and the Government is not reform, but to raise the price and double down.
But the public is crystal clear. Polling, repeated over many years, consistently shows that more than two-thirds of the British public want the TV licence fee scrapped altogether. This is a settled majority view — not a fringe position.
The Charter Review now underway is one of the last real chances to face reality. The BBC cannot be insulated from choice, competition and accountability forever.
A funding model that relies on criminal sanctions, bullying enforcement letters and now digital tracking is not sustainable — it is authoritarian.
The licence fee should not be patched up, rebranded or inflated again. It should be scrapped. Raising it to £180 only strengthens the case — and proves just how disconnected the system has become from the people forced to fund it.
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