Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what estimate his Department has made of the number of custodial sentences given for non-payment of the BBC licence fee in each of the last three years.

The maximum penalty for television license fee evasion is a Level 3 fine, so a custodial sentence may not be imposed for this offence. In 2017 fines accounted for 99.5% of sentencing outcomes for television license fee evasion.

Where offenders fail to pay fines, the courts have a range of enforcement powers, including, in the last resort, imprisonment of the offender.