Control of Britain’s 39m smart meters passes to non-profit startup

Control over Great Britain’s 39m smart meters has passed to a non-profit startup after its former owner presided over more than a decade of spiralling costs and delays in the troubled network.The company owned by crisis-hit outsourcing firm Capita has promised a “seamless transition” to its not-for-profit successor, which will take over running the data network connecting the smart meters from this week.The handover marks the end of a 13-year licence granted to Smart DCC, a subsidiary of Capita, to set up the country’s first smart meter data network, a process that has been dogged by costly delays while millions of households faced billing issues.Industry sources said Capita’s subsidiary was effectively blocked from tendering for a new licence to manage the smart meter network after Whitehall officials decided to replace the commercial framework established in 2013 with a not-for-profit public-interest model governed by an independent board.Instead, the network underpinning Britain’s smart meters will become a wholly owned subsidiary of the Smart Energy Code Company (SECCo) with “a greater focus on cost, transparency and customer and consumer needs”, the new operator said.Its board will include veteran energy and telecoms industry executives as well as Dame Gillian Guy, the former chief executive of Citizens Advice, which claimed in 2024 that households had been “let down” by the rollout because almost a third of smart meters weren’t working properly.Ministers had initially hoped that all households would have a smart meter before 2020 to help modernise Britain’s outdated energy system and make better use of renewable energy and innovative data-led energy tariffs.But the rollout has faced “serious reputational obstacles”, according to the government’s spending watchdog, which meant that three in 10 households still do not have a meter and another £1.7bn may be required to complete the rollout.The tender process for a new smart network operator ran last summer, at around the same time that the industry regulator opened an investigation into Smart DCC’s procurement contracts, which included deals that were awarded without a competitive process and one which was granted to its parent company, Capita.Smart DCC agreed in July to pay £200,000 into a consumer redress fund, in the same week that its parent company was forced to apologise for its role in administering the crisis-hit Civil Service Pension Scheme, which kept thousands of retired civil servants waiting for payments.Capita’s market value has plunged by 97% in the last decade after the outsourcing company once in charge of administering a string of government schemes revealed severely strained finances and mounting debts before undertaking an emergency restructuring of the business.A Capita spokesperson said: “Capita is proud of its 13-year stewardship of DCC. What began as an ambitious programme is now critical national infrastructure, connecting more than 39.2m smart meters across 23m homes and small businesses, with network availability of 99.6%.“We hand over a secure and resilient network that millions of consumers rely on every day and have been working with stakeholders to ensure an orderly transition to DCC’s next chapter.”A spokesperson for Ofgem said Smart DCC had “played a critical role” in delivering “an efficient and secure digital communication structure”, and that the new licence holder would be expected to “build on that solid foundation”.