Lawyer explains whether you can actually go to prison for not paying your TV licence
Emily Puckering
Featured Image Credit: TikTok/@tiktokstreetlawyer/Isreal Sebastian/Getty Images
A lawyer has answered the question we're sure many Brits have at some point in their lives wondered: Can you really be sent to prison for not paying your TV licence?
Of course, it goes without saying that us Brits love a good moan about the costs of the TV licence - but regardless of the whining, the majority of us just pay up and enjoy access to a wide range of amazing TV shows and channels, making the annual fee of £159 pretty worth it.
But not everyone agrees with the fee, with many continuing to watch TV guilt-free without a TV licence and spending their days dodging a visit from the dreaded TV licence officers.
While their threatening letters and scary adverts make not having a TV licence sound like an unforgivable crime, what can really happen if you get caught watching your favourite Netflix show without one?
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Legal expert Nasir Hafezi - who is well known on TikTok as @tiktokstreetlawyer - has explained exactly what could happen to you for not paying and whether you could really end up in prison.
Hafezi started by explaining that not paying your licence fee and watching anything live on any channel or streaming service is an offence.
He then explained that you can get prosecuted for watching TV without a licence, so you could end up in court and potentially be fined as much as £1,000 for your transgression.
But this doesn't necessarily mean prison time.
To land yourself behind bars, you'd need to have a 'refusal to pay the fine' and land yourself in a situation where 'all other enforcement methods have been tried'.
"In short, while you cannot go to prison for simply not paying your TV licence fee, you can go to prison if you deliberately refuse to pay the court fine," he explained.
Hafezi said that in 2017, there were 137,913 prosecutions over the TV licence and 72 percent of these were for women.
In that year, 30 percent of all women prosecuted were being done for not paying their TV licence, whereas only four percent of men getting in trouble in court were being nailed for non-payment.
Hafezi said this massive disparity was explained in part by women being more likely to be in when one of the TV licence people went to visit someone's homes.
According to statistics from Full Fact, nobody in the UK was jailed over not paying their TV license in 2020-2021 - but in 2019, two people were locked up.
Of course, while the chances of being jailed for not paying a TV licence are incredibly slim, watching or streaming TV without one is still breaking the law - so it's important to make sure you have paid for a licence before settling down to watch some (quite literally) guilt-free telly.