Smart meters are yet another British mess

The introduction of “smart” meters into British homes is an all-toofamiliar tale of eye-watering expense, botched decision-making, ignored warnings and buck-passing. This is the biggest infrastructure undertaken since the introduction of natural gas to households in the Seventies. Yet as our letters page in recent weeks can testify, the whole episode has been a mess – and an avoidable one, too.

The advent of smart metering can be traced to EU efforts to reduce carbon emissions as part of a campaign against global warming. The Labour government and then the Coalition bought into, and even enhanced, the targets for removing coal-fired power stations and curbing energy use. The meters were intended to back up this policy.

Elsewhere in Europe, the task of installing them was given to distribution network operators. In the UK it was entrusted to the suppliers, with baleful consequences. In Italy, smart meters were rolled out to 32 million homes at a fraction of the cost here, where the chosen route led to greater complexity and higher cost, the hallmark of a British infrastructure scheme.

Successive governments were warned that this would happen by industry experts and yet they carried on regardless, presumably on the basis that officials in Whitehall know best. Mike O’brien, a Labour energy minister, said they were lobbied to do this by the supply companies.

But as Keith Anderson, the chief executive of Scottishpower, one of the so-called Big Six, points out in his letter on this page, that is not entirely true. His company “consistently argued that network companies would have been best placed to install smart meters effectively and efficiently”.

Mr Anderson said his arguments were based on looking at best practice elsewhere in the world. Why on earth do British governments not do the same? Roads, airports, runways, tunnels, computer systems, defence contracts – all cost far more than they should and are often infinitely more expensive than elsewhere. Heathrow’s third runway construction costs are estimated at around £14bn, yet Schipol in Amsterdam built a fifth runway for just £300m – less than the price of a new car park at the London hub.

These public sector infrastructure fiascoes happen over and over again in the UK. There is a deep-seated culture of resistance against heeding advice and admitting to mistakes. It needs to change.