Given McDonagh’s role chairing the body that is responsible for raising public awareness of the rollout – crucial for its success – her views should carry weight with the government. The smart meter rollout has been relatively low on the political agenda for the past couple of years, as affordability and customer service concerns have swamped all else. As McDonagh says, “politicians on all sides haven’t yet grasped the scale of the programme” – but with meter installers set to visit every home in the country over the next five years, and the huge potential for multiple call-outs, delays, faults and frustrations, they will wake up to reality pretty quickly.
With a new government in power and the rollout set to begin in earnest at the end of this year, the moment is ripe for the creation of an overarching body with full transparency and accountability. There are currently dozens of interested parties allied to the rollout, but no one clear leader. As McDonagh says, “we need to be able to name the chief executive with whom the buck stops”.
There would be other advantages to having a David Higgins-style leader. For example, a chief executive could act on such eminently sensible suggestions as that made to Utility Week by Lord Whitty, for the smart meter rollout to be used as an opportunity to carry out an energy efficiency assessment on every home in the UK. It is a pragmatic suggestion that could be relatively simple to implement, if there was a single body running the rollout, maximising the benefit of smart meters for individual customers and the overall effort to limit carbon emissions.
A single leader would also have the clout and the nous to ask some fundamental questions about the structure of the rollout. Such as, why are suppliers running the show? And is it too late to put the distribution networks in charge of a geographically led rollout? Now there’s a thought…