The phrase “shoot for the moon and even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars”, is well known, but seemingly not inside the Department of Energy and Climate Change (Decc), at least when it comes to the smart meter rollout.
Energy minister Andrea Leadsom, giving evidence to the Energy and Climate Change select committee, steadfastly refused to even suggest what Decc would consider a successful smart meter rollout by 2020.
“I am resisting setting a target because, frankly, for the life of me I cannot understand why the committee would expect that,” she said.
“What would be the merit of guessing how many people would accept the offer?”
Decc says that modelling in its impact assessment for the £11 billion project assumes that replacing “97 per cent of the meter population with a smart meter equates to effective completion of the mass rollout”. And former energy minister Baroness Verma said the programme will replace 53 million meters.
However, one of the last members of the ministerial team within Decc to set a target for a government-backed project was Greg Barker, with his now infamous sleepless nights comment if the Green Deal failed to hit 10,000 plans by the end of 2013. It only reached 15,138 plans in progress at the end of October 2015.
Even if the programme lands among the stars, missing the moon would be seen as a failure. One Leadsom is dodging by avoiding Barker’s mistake and not setting out what success is.