Smart Meters Bill

Debate between Lord Teverson and Baroness Maddock

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 24th April 2018 Grand Committee

[Baroness Maddock]

My Lords, I rise to move Amendment 5—I hope I have got the right number this time and I apologise if I confused people before.

This is a probing amendment. I have raised issues with the Government before about the interoperability and the joining-up of the different policies that we have. Fuel poverty is an area in which I take an interest and the Bill impacts on fuel poverty strategy and affects those in fuel poverty. It also impacts on energy efficiency, which, as the Government have made clear, is one of the reasons for the programme. However, I am never quite sure how good the Government are at joining everything up. The amendment therefore asks the Government to review how this programme is affecting the fuel poverty and energy efficiency programmes and how it can benefit them.

On fuel poverty, the ability for people on low incomes to get an accurate bill and save energy is important. We know that shock bills can create a sense of fear in people and quite often that is why they end up going into debt. Inaccurate bills can sometimes have the same effect and we recognise that part of this development is to prevent people receiving inaccurate bills. Any delays in the programme will have a greater adverse effect on those who are in fuel poverty or are vulnerable in some way or another.

The pre-payment meter price cap, to which we will come later, is still closely linked with the smart meter rollout. One area of the rollout concerns me. Smart meters have been of great benefit to people on pre-paid meters but I understand there might be problems later when the SMETS 2 come in. Could the Minister reassure us that the Government have this in hand, because some people are concerned about how it might work out?

I learned today something that neither I nor my colleagues had heard of before. Photovoltaics on roofs is one of the energy efficiency programmes that we have introduced in the past, but when one of my colleagues in the House who has such a system asked for a smart meter she was told that she could not have one. However, she might be able to when SMETS 2 comes in. So there are two questions about the SMETS 2 meters: are people who pre-pay going to suffer and what are we doing about people with solar panels? Do the Government know how many houses have solar panels? That is a whole chunk out at the moment. If that is the case, they should be the first people to get SMETS 2. Somebody should try to target it in that way.

The other issue is one that I have discovered, I think from the briefings we got from Smart Energy GB, which is the fact that not everybody has an in-house display when they have their meter fitted. I was quite shocked by this because I thought that was the whole point. As it said in the briefings I received from it, some people have meters in very strange places—in cupboards under the stairs and all sorts of places. I cannot understand why the programme was not insisting that, when you have a smart meter, you have an in-house display, otherwise many of the benefits that we hope smart meters will bring are somewhat negated if you cannot read it very easily.

I am not going to prolong the Committee much longer, but it is important, whenever the Government review what is going on with the smart meter rollout, that they think carefully about the other areas of policy. As I said, and as I raised before, I am particularly concerned about those in fuel poverty. I know that the smart meter rollout companies are working quite carefully with other people to help those in fuel poverty. I declared an interest at Second Reading because I am a vice-president of a fuel poverty charity, National Energy Action. I would be interested to hear whether the Minister can answer a couple of the questions I have given him. I urge that, whatever reviews we have, we must sometimes refer to how it is impacting on other government policies. I beg to move.

[Lord Teverson]

My Lords, I shall speak to my Amendments 12 and 13. One of the things that has exercised me most about this programme is how, in the transition from SMETS 1 to SMETS 2, we assess that we are sufficiently there to fire the gun to roll out what is an £11 billion programme. That is not an insignificant amount of money. My noble friend Lady Featherstone pointed to the congestion charge. I do not know what it cost to roll out; it was expensive, but I suspect it was not anywhere near £11 billion. That is why it is important, before the rest of this happens, that we make sure we are in the right place.

I understand that we currently have some 300 SMETS meters out there being tested. I also understand that there is still a further software upgrade to happen in September—I would be interested to know whether that is the case—yet we have a deadline of October, which is only some six months away. That is why I am saying in the amendment—it is rather a blunt instrument and probably would not be absolutely correct for the final Bill—that there should be some 500,000 SMETS 2 meters out there to make sure that this market works. That seems like a huge number, but I remind noble Lords that it is 1% of the total number of meters that have to be smart by the end of this programme—some 47 million to 50 million. That is why, in terms of the size of the programme and the length of time we have already taken in getting it right and getting consumer confidence, I am trying to understand from the Government and the Minister what tests they have and what threshold they are expecting to see before they say that the programme is fully fit for purpose, they have confidence and they are going to roll the rest of it out as SMETS 2—SMETS 1 no longer, although we have 10 million of those meters already. What is the threshold that says that they have the confidence to roll out one of the most expensive projects? I am not sure that it is as expensive as Hinkley C, but it probably will be by the end of the Hinkley C programme. It is a huge amount of money and a huge national investment that is really important for the future, so what is the threshold test before we roll it out with confidence?