Smart meters are the latest in a long line of Whitehall blunders

What is it about Britain that turns every major IT project into an embarrassing debacle

Imagine you are an EU Brexit negotiator asked to consider the UK Government’s preferred option for dealing with the conundrum caused by the border in Ireland. The paper agreed at Chequers last month proposes setting up a highly complex arrangement whereby the UK collects the tariffs on goods bound for the EU.

Would you trust us to do that efficiently and competently? If you looked at the history of IT projects in this country over the past 20 years you would run a mile – as, indeed, the EU already has. Michel Barnier has rejected the idea on the grounds that it cuts across the uniform integrity of the single market. But a more obvious reason for doing so is the likelihood that we would simply cock it up.

This is not to knock the aptitude of a country which we all hope will thrive in the post-brexit world, but merely to observe that we are almost uniquely awful at planning and implementing major infrastructure projects.

As our letters page has demonstrated in recent days, the introduction (or roll-out as we must now call these events) of smart meters to some 30 million homes and businesses in the UK is turning into yet another mess. Consumers complain that they are told by the suppliers that they must have a meter to gain certain tariffs even though they are not obligatory. Or they find that when they move suppliers the smart meter they had installed is useless.

What is so depressing about all of this is that when the smart meters programme was being put together many of the glitches we are now seeing were predicted. I wrote about it on these pages five years ago after speaking to an energy expert called Alex Henney, who had been banging his head against a Whitehall brick wall trying to get officialdom to heed his warnings of a looming debacle.

“We have devised the most complex roll-out in the world, relying on suppliers to provide the meters rather than the distributive network,” he observed. “This increases the cost of capital and requires an additional large database, which will lead to errors and confusion as we switch suppliers. The project is likely to be a shambles which will have negligible consumer benefit.”

Mr Henney was right, but no one listened and you have to ask why not? Is there something inherently dysfunctional about our system of governance that lends itself to such fiascoes? We are supposed to have checks and balances to obviate government mistakes: legislative procedures, select committees, regulators, courts and auditors – all are able to flag up problems and blow the whistle on mistakes. So why does it not work as it should?

The smart meters programme was examined on several occasions by the Commons energy select committee which, while raising concerns about consumer resistance, never questioned the basic flaw in the model, which was to entrust installation to the supplier rather than the distributive network.

In 2014, a year before the nationwide roll-out was to begin, the Public Accounts Committee identified a number of issues that it wanted the Government to address. As well as criticising high costs and built-in obsolescence, the report concluded: “Smart meters need to be fully interoperable so that customers can switch easily between suppliers, but there are no regulations preventing suppliers from [unnecessarily] replacing meters when customers switch.” This was simply ignored.

Over the years, the costs of IT and other policy foul-ups have been phenomenal. Often, as with smart meters, the idea is a good one; the problem has been the implementation. This so perplexed two academics, the late Prof Anthony King and Prof Sir Ivor Crewe, that they tried to analyse the causes in their book The Blunders of Our Governments (2013).

Their list of foul-ups included, inter alia, the poll tax, entry into the Exchange Rate Mechanism, misselling of pensions, Individual Learning Accounts, the Millennium Dome, the Assets Recovery Agency, ID cards, PFI, the Child Support Agency, the abortive NHS data plan and many, many more. Quite a few, though not all, have one thing in common: the failure of information technology. Even as their book was published, two more major projects, Universal Credit and HS2, were beginning their inexorable journey on the road to calamity. Cumulatively all of these failures have cost the taxpayer more than £100 billion.

The book never really managed to track down the cause of these blunders or establish whether we do things worse than elsewhere, or than we did in the past. But once again taking the smart meters programme as an example, it is apparent that a similar scheme was rolled out to 32 million households in Italy at a fraction of the cost here and in just a few years. This was principally because the job was given to the network company which could impose a uniform system.

Furthermore, even though the EU had stipulated all member nations should have 80 per cent smart meter penetration by 2020, the Germans took a far more sceptical view of the likely benefits and are only now embarking on the programme.

A fundamental political difference between the UK and countries where things appear to work better is that many of them are coalitions where these matters have to be thrashed out and compromises reached. This negotiating process seems more suited to identifying potential catastrophes than the winner-takes-all first-pastthe-post system. Here, promises are made in manifestoes: a party wins the election, takes office and relentlessly pursues its agenda whether it turns out to be a turkey or not. True, this doesn’t entirely work for the smart meter programme, since most of that happened under the Tory/lib Dem coalition. But the critical decisions were taken by Labour.

Paradoxically, what we often consider to be the strength of our system – its propensity to decisiveness – may be its very weakness. To counterbalance this potential flaw, we have an extraordinary network of think tanks, expert bodies and enthusiastic amateurs offering advice on how governments can avoid the pitfalls of misplaced certainty. But for this to work, politicians and officials must be ready to listen, not just blunder on regardless.