Households that watch only YouTube, Netflix or other on-demand services could be required to contribute towards the BBC under options being considered by Lisa Nandy, the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport.
The annual licence costs £180. No decision has been made, and the department has published no figures for how many additional households would pay, how much the BBC would receive or what enforcement would cost.
Watching television without a required licence is a criminal offence, with a fine of up to £1,000. Ministers have not said whether that regime would apply to households brought in by the new rules. The government’s own Green Paper of December 2025 records that about 53 per cent of the 287,000 households using the Simple Payment Plan, which spreads the cost for people in financial difficulty, fall behind on payments. It also describes the high share of licence prosecutions brought against women as an ongoing concern.
The last time the licence was extended to online viewing, the BBC could not say how much extra money the change had brought in. In September 2016, the requirement was extended to anyone watching or downloading BBC programmes on demand through iPlayer. In November 2017, the BBC’s deputy director-general, Anne Bulford, told the Commons Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee that about £12 million in licence sales in the second half of the year had come directly from people who bought a licence after seeing the iPlayer prompt.
She could not say how much of that was additional. Whether those viewers “would have bought a licence anyway is very hard to judge,” she said, and others may have bought one after receiving ordinary licensing letters because they knew the rules had changed. Total licence fee income had risen by about £40 million, which she attributed to household growth and measures against evasion as well as the iPlayer change. She said collection was “broadly in line with our forecasts and expectations,” and that much of the benefit lay in reducing the risk of people leaving the licence system as viewing moved online.
The 2016 change therefore produced identifiable licence sales, but its net financial effect was never isolated in the evidence given to Parliament.
What Nandy has said
On 13 July 2026, Nandy appeared before what was then the Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee. Its chair, Dame Caroline Dinenage, asked whether the licence would be extended to streaming services and video-sharing platforms. Nandy said it was “one of the options under consideration.”
She set out several possible arrangements:
a charge added to streaming subscriptions;
a smaller additional payment for households with a streaming service;
extending the charge to all subscribers with targeted concessions;
cutting the licence fee for everyone if its scope were widened.
She described a subscription surcharge and a licence requirement for subscribers as “either/or” choices, and said the final arrangement could be a mix of options.
The government has ruled out funding the BBC through general taxation, a new household tax or a levy on streaming companies’ revenues. Nandy said a levy on streaming businesses would deter investment in the UK. The Conservative MP Damian Hinds asked whether a surcharge on customers’ subscriptions would deter investment in the same way. “We are modelling that at the moment,” she replied. “We do not have certainty about any of these options at the moment.”
The department’s stated reason for rejecting a levy on streaming companies has therefore not yet been tested publicly against the option of charging their customers.
On 19 October, Ian Murray, Minister of State for Creative Industries, Media and Online Safety, answered a written question from the Conservative MP Gregory Stafford asking what assessment had been made of charging streaming-only households. Murray said the services requiring a licence were under review as part of the Charter Review, and that decisions would be set out in a White Paper expected by the end of the year. His answer gave no figures for additional payers, expected revenue, costs to households or enforcement.
Fewer licences, more money
The BBC’s 2025/26 accounts recorded 23.3 million licences in force at 31 March 2026, down 539,000 on the year. Licence fee income still rose by £36 million to £3.879 billion, in a year when the annual charge was £174.50. Total group income was £5.962 billion, and the BBC reported a group deficit of £121 million.
The fee rose to £180 on 1 April 2026, under the inflation-linked arrangement that runs until the end of the current Charter.
On 20 October, the BBC announced that BBC Three, BBC Scotland and Radio 4 Extra would close as broadcast services in spring 2027, with their programmes moving to iPlayer and BBC Sounds. The closures form part of a plan to save £500 million by 2028.
What would become chargeable
Under the current rules, a licence is needed to watch live television on any service and to watch or download BBC programmes on iPlayer. Watching ordinary on-demand videos on YouTube, or on-demand programmes on Netflix, does not by itself require one.
The government has not said which activities would become chargeable. YouTube carries television programmes, independent journalism, educational videos, podcasts, gaming streams and material made by individual creators. A surcharge on paid subscriptions would not reach someone watching free YouTube videos. A rule based on what people actually watched would raise the question of how anyone could establish what a household had viewed.
Commercial broadcasters have objected to playing any part in enforcement. The Commercial Broadcasters Association told MPs its members “should not be required to enforce the licence fee on behalf of the BBC,” and ITV and Sky made the same argument. The committee recorded these objections in its report of 1 October.
What MPs recommended
The renamed Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee went further than ministers in its report of 1 October. It recommended broadening the scope of the licence in time for the next Royal Charter in January 2028, so that the licence is “no longer linked to a particular device or activity.” It also recommended cutting the cost of an individual licence, provided that did not reduce the sustainability of the BBC’s income or its ability to fulfil its public purposes. It recommended that the next Charter be permanent, with no end date.
The BBC told the committee that a model requiring more households to contribute at a lower cost could make the system fairer and more sustainable. Whether a wider, cheaper licence would raise more than the present one depends on how many households are added, what they pay and what it costs to collect.
The committee also said the government “should not have ruled out” a household levy entirely, while accepting that one would be hard to introduce quickly. The BBC’s director-general, Matt Brittin, told MPs that a levy could save about £190 million a year in collection costs. That is his estimate of what a different system might save, not a saving that has been made.
The current Charter expires on 31 December 2027. Ten years after the iPlayer change, whose extra revenue the BBC could not isolate, the department is considering bringing a much wider group of households into the licence system, and has yet to publish what they would pay, what the BBC would gain after collection costs or how the requirement would be enforced.