Television Licences: Non-payment

(asked on 20th June 2019) - View Source

Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many (a) people, (b) people aged over 75 and (c) women aged over 75 were prosecuted for the evasion of payment of TV licence fees in each year between 1990 and 1999.


Answered by
Paul Maynard Portrait
Paul Maynard
Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Work and Pensions)
This question was answered on 27th June 2019

The lead Government Department on TV licencing is the Department for Digital, Culture Media and Sport.

The Ministry of Justice has published the number of prosecutions, convictions and sentencing outcomes for the non-payment of TV license fees and figures for each year since 2008 up to December 2018 are available in the Outcomes by Offence data tool: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/802314/outcomes-by-offence-tool-2018.xlsx

  • Select ‘191A Television licence evasion’ in the Offence filter; prosecutions can be found in row 24 and convictions are in row 25.
  • The number of offenders sentenced to immediate custody can be found in row 36, however custody is not a sentencing option for TV licence evasion, therefore this row is nil.
  • To see these figures for females, select ’02: Female’ in the Sex filter.

The number of people prosecuted and sentenced to immediate custody in total and for TV licence evasion in the years between 1992 (the earliest available in the court proceedings database) and 1999, by age and sex can be found in the attached tables.

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