There is a potential nasty little surprise for the government in this. There are millions of people entitled to receive pension credit who have never applied for it. In fact it's been estimated that there is a saving to the government from this of £5.5 billion pounds.

If an effect of this TV license change is to get these people to find out about pension credit and to apply for it, the cost to the government will be vastly higher than the saving they made by offloading the cost of free licences onto the BBC to collect (and, quite predictably, to cut). And on top of that, getting pension credit automatically means being eligible for lots of other benefits, making it even more costly to the government when more people apply.