Smart meters will cost each British household £420 and save people just “a tenner a year”, according to reports.

Cost-benefit estimates for the British smart meter programme vary hugely, with figures ranging from modest savings of around £26 a year (as we reported last year) to the Mail on Sunday’s latest guess coming from Gordon Hughes, an economist at the University of Edinburgh.

“The introduction of the smart meter is a dog’s breakfast. At best it is misconceived and an astonishingly expensive project. For those claiming it will bring major savings, I say they need to grow up,” Hughes dutifully raged for the Sunday newspaper.

The £11bn project, which came about in part because of European Union directive 2009/72/EC, snappily titled “Directive 2009/72/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 13 July 2009 concerning common rules for the internal market in electricity and repealing Directive 2003/54/EC (Text with EEA relevance)”, along with a similar directive on gas meters, is supposed to put smart meters into 80 per cent of households by the year 2020.

An EU webpage last updated a couple of weeks ago says the UK is on track to meet this target, though the source of its claim is unclear. The same page states: “While cost estimates vary, the cost of a smart metering system averages between €200 and €250 [£184 - £230] per customer, while delivering benefits per metering point of €160 [£147] for gas and €309 [£284] for electricity along with, on average, three per cent energy savings.”

Four years ago a British report revealed that the cost of installing smart meters in the UK is £390 per household, while more recent estimates are that the benefits are now as low as £11 per household

With the UK slated to leave the EU by 2020, it is unlikely that any financial penalties will result if the target is missed.

Smart Metering deployment in the European Union
http://ses.jrc.ec.europa.eu/smart-metering-deployment-european-union

The Capita-owned monopoly that runs Britain’s smart meter infrastructure made an operating profit of £390m last year – but paid no tax and is owed £42m by the wider smart meter industry.

Smart DCC Ltd’s “regulatory accounts” for the year ending March 31 were published earlier this week in its annual report.

The firm, also known as the Data Communications Company, is a wholly owned subsidiary of Capita and has a monopoly over the management of Britain’s smart meter infrastructure, under its licence to operate from the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS). It decides who will build and operate that infrastructure by awarding contracts, on behalf of the State, to suppliers, and then manages those contracts.