Glaswegians are hit the hardest in Scotland for not having TV licences.

New figures show more than 2000 fines were issued in 2015-16 alone, up a third in a year.

The city, Scotland's poorest, accounts for one in four fixed penalty notices issued north of the border for TV Licence offences despite having just 11 per cent of the country's population.

Nobody in Scotland has gone to jail for not paying a TV licence thanks to separate and successive reforms by both Labour and SNP governments. Most people are issued with out of court fines for "dodging" the licence. Another 15 people were prosecuted for the crime, four of them from Glasgow.

BACKGROUND: How defaulting on fines for failure to pay TV licence could get you the jail

The numbers were obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by campaigner Caroline Levesque-Bartlett who believes the licence regime is unfair.

She said: "Considering that there are only 100,000 more people in Glasgow than in Edinburgh, the fact that there are three times more prosecutions in Glasgow paints a very sad picture.

"I'm not ready to say that there are more TV licence 'dodgers', a term I hate because it involves dishonest practices to evade an obligation.

"I don't think the TV licence fee should be mandatory, at the very least not for people who don't use BBC services."

In England and Wales it is still possible to go to jail for not paying your licence, if you default on fines. Ms Levesque-Bartlett's numbers show women are the biggest target of law enforcement, on both sides of the border.

Of the 7,928 people fined in Scotland in 2015-2016 in Scotland, 5741 were female. Of the 2005 people fined in Glasgow in the same year, 1482 were women.

A spokesman for TV Licensing, a BBC division, said: “We enforce the law in Scotland by taking a statement from those who evade, as it does in the rest of the UK.

"Subject to the usual evidential and public interest tests, cases are then sent for prosecution to the Procurator-Fiscal who decides how cases are dealt with.

"In the vast majority of cases, the PF levies a fixed penalty by way of an out-of-court disposal."