Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, if he will make an assessment of the potential effect on students living away from home of the closure of the iPlayer loophole.

The Government consulted on adding on-demand programme services to the TV licence framework as part of its Green Paper published in July last year. Under the new proposals, all individuals will need to be covered by a TV licence if they stream or download television programmes through on-demand services provided by the BBC (notably the iPlayer). If an individual has a licence already, then they are automatically covered to watch BBC on-demand services under the new proposals.