The Good Morning Britain presenter accused the taxpayer-funded corporation of making “D-Day veterans pay £154 for their TV licence”. Piers Morgan tweeted: “So we’re going to make D-Day veterans pay £154 for their TV licences? “What an absolute disgrace. Shame on you, BBC.” Around 3.7 million pensioners are believed to be affected by the change and many have attacked the “disgraceful decision”.

Pension Credit is a non-taxable weekly top up for pensioners based on a person’s income and the BBC estimate those eligible to apply could number 1.5 million by 2020.

Announcing the news, BBC Chairman Sir David Clementi said: “Copying the current scheme was ultimately untenable. It would have cost £745 million a year by 2021/22 – and risen to over one billion by the end of the next decade.

“£745 million a year is equivalent to around a fifth of the BBC’s spending on services.

“The scale of the current concession and its quickly rising cost would have meant profoundly damaging closures of major services that we know audiences – and older audiences in particular – love, use, and value every day.

As part of the charter agreement which came into effect in 2017, the BBC would take on the burden of paying for free licences by June 2020.

From that date, following a review by the broadcaster, only households with someone aged over 75 who receives pension credit will be eligible for a free TV licence funded by the BBC.

Around 3.7 million pensioners will lose out, it is thought.

The new scheme will cost the BBC around £250 million by 2021/22, depending on the take-up. 

The broadcaster said that if it bore the full financial burden of the free licences, the extra cost would have meant “unprecedented closures”.

This would have included the closures of BBC Two, BBC Four, the BBC News Channel, the BBCScotland channel, Radio 5live and a number of local radio stations, as well as other cuts and reductions , it said.

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