BBC licence fee payments down 800,000 in two years
Have shared a QR code for paying a licence fee on every World Cup broadcast in the summer, you can sense their desperation.
Perhaps people are sick of paying £160 a year to fund sex offenders and paedophiles.
The Licence fee is not flexible like netflix or Disney+ where people can opt out or unsubscribe for example through a month in the summer, and sign up again to binge watch a series.
The BBC fee is charged at double rate for the first six months to ‘catch up’ on payments before settling to £15 a month. There is no flexibility there and it’s a nightmare to manage.
Instead why not make it free to consumers and fund it through other networks like Sky, Virgin, BT, Netflix, YouTube (Alphabet),et al who can be charged a fee to broadcast in the UK. This would be a more flexible and fairer way to fund the BBC and although the costs would be passed on to consumers, it would be more flexible and fairer than the current model and allow users to opt in and out of different services as they wish.
The number of people paying the BBC’s licence fee has fallen faster than expected in the last year, with half a million more households opting out of the payment.
Matt Brittin, the BBC’s director general, said the broadcaster faced a “moment of real jeopardy”, as the licence fee funding model “ties us to the past”.
There are now 23.3m TV licences in force, a fall of 539,000 from a year earlier, according to the corporation’s annual report. It is significantly more than the 300,000 fall in licence fee payers recorded a year earlier.
The pace at which households are opting not to pay the licence fee has been alarming BBC executives for months, with the annual report conceding a “steeper projected decline in licence fee sales”.
The report also revealed that the BBC’s top on-air earner in 2025-26 was Scott Mills, on £750,000, though he has since been sacked after allegations about his personal conduct.
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