‘YouTube Tax’: Britain Plans to Stretch the £180 BBC Licence Fee to Netflix, YouTube and Disney+

Watch YouTube, pay the BBC. That is the plan now being lined up in Whitehall, The Independent reported on Thursday evening 15 October: the £180-a-year licence fee would be extended to online services such as YouTube, Netflix, Amazon and Disney+, which are currently outside it.

Today you need a licence to watch live TV on any device or to use BBC iPlayer. Catch-up viewing on other platforms is free. A senior Whitehall source told the paper that loophole lets people dodge the fee on phones, tablets and laptops, and that the change will be in the BBC charter white paper due before Christmas. An estimated three to four million extra households would have to pay.

“It’s not fair that people are essentially able to watch television content but avoid the licence fee.”

— A senior Whitehall source, to The Independent

Cash for ‘local journalism’ — and fighting ‘fake news’

The same source said the new money should go to local journalism and to countering “conspiracy theories and fake news”, which they claimed had helped parties like Reform UK win votes. The BBC is under pressure: about 539,000 fewer licences were in force in the year to 31 March 2026, around two million fewer over five years, and the corporation reported a £121m operating deficit for 2025/26. A Commons committee has already urged that the fee be cut loose from live TV.

The Department for Culture, Media and Sport says it is looking at a range of options and “no final decisions have been made”. The current charter runs out at the end of 2027. Andrew Bridgen, who had warned in January that streaming would be swept into the fee, wrote on X that the government had now come clean. Critics call it a tax on watching the internet.