Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what data his Department holds on the number of (a) people and (b) women given custodial sentences for the non-payment of a magistrates’ court fine arising from a conviction for evasion of payment of TV licence fees in 2021.

The Ministry of Justice publishes figures on the number of people fined for non-payment of a TV licence, broken down by fine amounts, on an annual basis on the GOV.UK website. These figures were most recently updated in May 2022, in the ‘Sentencing Outcomes’ worksheet in the Magistrates' court data tool (MS Excel Spreadsheet, 17.1 MB) as part of the Criminal Justice System statistics quarterly: December 2021 publication. The number of people fined for this offence can be found by filtering for HO Offence Code ‘19101 – Television licence evasion’ and breaking this down by fine amount. These figures can also be broken down by various demographics such as age and gender. The average fine amount is available on the ‘Average Amounts’ worksheet.

The penalty for TV licence evasion is a fine. A person cannot receive a custodial sentence for TV licence evasion but can be committed to prison for wilfully refusing to pay the fine or culpably neglecting to pay. In 2021, there were no admissions into prison associated with failing to pay a fine in respect of the non-payment of a TV licence in England and Wales.