Heating timebomb is being ignored by Scotland’s Labour MPs

It was the wartime Scottish Secretary Tom Johnston, who persuaded feudal landowners to give up land for hydro dams across the Highlands finally bringing “power to the glens” in the 1940s.

For my Caithness family it was revolutionary. They used tilly lamps till Johnson’s hydro provided electricity. And the man who did it was a Labour politician. Energy mattered that much to the late Alba leader and former oil economist and though it’s reserved to Westminster, Salmond used devolved planning powers to veto new nuclear plants and approve a massive expansion of onshore wind – whilst it was effectively banned by the Tories in England for almost a decade.

And whilst the indyref will be his enduring legacy, not far behind is the fact that in January of this year more than 100% of Scottish electricity was produced by renewable energy for the first time.

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So, I’d imagine Alex was livid earlier this month, when the energy industry admitted a cock-up of gargantuan proportions which could mean 175,000 Scottish energy customers have their heating switched permanently on or off next June, as the BBC switches off its longwave transmitter and the Radio Teleswitch Service (RTS) loses its capacity to send signals to meters in homes.

Faced with a baffling combination of smart meters, the BBC, VHF wavelengths, RTS and massive energy bills, those who should expose this shameful mess – Scotland’s new Labour MPs since energy infrastructure is reserved to Westminster – seem to have walked on by.

In fact, the roll-out of smart meters is a multi-billion-pound scandal promoted by successive British prime ministers – Labour and Tory – and disproportionately hitting Scottish consumers.

The story starts with Margaret Thatcher and her chaotic, privatised energy market which produced dozens of competing suppliers. So, when other countries moved to install smart meters – able to price energy use more efficiently and deliver accurate bills minus customer readings – they did so by giving the job to a single nationalised or private body. Obviously.

Not in Britain.

In 2006, Chancellor Gordon Brown announced the smart meter revolution would be rolled out via the Tories’ privatised energy supply companies. The consumers’ group Which? wanted a single government body to install whole streets at a time, making the switch systematic and keeping costs down. But eventually in 2011, the new Tory Energy Minister Charles Hendry authorised private energy companies to install meters “on demand” from customers.

Badgering letters and emails to customers started when (predictably) this random approach failed and Ofgem demanded greater take-up. Insiders say the cost to billpayers by then was around £11.1 billion, though the Department for Energy and Net Zero (DESNZ) says that figure was just a forecast.

And so, with Labour and the Tories flushing business towards private energy suppliers, the hopeless patchwork of random smart meter installation began.

Soon it became clear metered consumers weren’t changing energy consumption patterns in a very significant way. According to DESNZ, "consumers save an average of 3.4% of electricity consumption from engaging with meters". 

I’ve got to say that’s a fairly pitiful return on investment and nowhere near the smart meter "revolution" we were promised. Indeed, Mike O’Brien, Gordon Brown’s former energy minister, admitted in 2018 that he got rid of his “in-home display” because he “barely looked at it”. Other ex-ministers said the programme had been rushed through because politicians wanted to meet the Paris Accord climate change targets.

So far, so bad. But the fiasco had a few extra twists in Scotland.

About half a million customers living in tenements have storage heating with two meters (one for night-time and the other for daytime use) and electricity companies have been trying to avoid responsibility for replacing them with a single smart meter.

Citizens Advice estimates 52.3% of these customers are living in fuel poverty but they must bear all the costs of maintaining old-fashioned manual meter readings until someone steps up.

As it stands, they’ll miss out on new “smart” energy deals offering lower prices for customers who can manage the peaks and troughs of energy production and consumption.

But worse than missing marginal savings – these folk are most likely to lose control over their heating next June.

The RTS system has piggybacked the BBC’s longwave transmission for decades and the energy industry knew switch-off was imminent, because the technology is way past its retirement date. Yet energy companies have done next to nothing to speed up smart meter installation.

(Image: James Manning/PA)

There’s more. Even folk with one single meter may find it doesn’t work after a change of energy supplier. It’s a total burach.

Yet the energy companies are portraying themselves as valiant saviours, struggling to help at-risk customers out of the goodness of their hearts, when they are the ones who’ve failed to deliver.

The only reason we know about the looming catastrophe is because the energy regulator Ofgem finally saw red.

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Well, maybe a polite deep pink.

Charlotte Friel, Ofgem’s director of consumer protection, told Radio Scotland: “The pace of replacement is not where it needs to be. The industry has been working on RTS replacement for some time and has replaced 200,000 meters this year, but there are still 700,000 to go.”

Who is worst affected?

Ms Friel says: “Typically if your meter switches between on and off-peak rates, if your home is heated by electric storage heaters and if you live in a region that is off-gas supply, you have an RTS meter.”

In other words – SCOTLAND – with plenty of tenements and rural areas never connected to mains gas.

It’s a scandal.

The roll-out of smart meters – £13.5bn in 2022 to connect 47% of households – has been a near-total waste of time and money with an average installation cost of £485 per household (more than twice the cost in Italy and Spain and 10 times more than India and Brazil).

(Image: Andrew Matthews/PA Wire)

The Department for Energy Security doesn't dispute the high installation costs, but insist "£13.5bn is not a standalone figure for costs by 2022, but a forecast of rollout costs through to 2034" by which time they say, "the smart meter rollout is set to deliver a £6bn net benefit" and is already breaking even.

One energy specialist said that break-even claim is hard to "prove".

And it’s clear the rollout is uneven and slow.

Despite asking for Scottish figures, DESNZ told me that by June 2024, there were "36.2 million smart and advanced meters across Great Britain; 63% of all meters, and 64% of domestic properties".

But according to energy activists, the proportion converted in Scotland is closer to 51% in Scotland, which is pretty poor.

In 2018, the National Audit Office warned consumers faced paying an extra half a billion pounds for the smart meter scheme with no chance it would now meet its deadline.

Still the wobbly but unstoppable rollout continued on Boris Johnson’s watch. The original date by which everyone should have had a smart meter came and went in 2019, followed by extension after extension so that no-one’s clear what the actual target is any more.

It could all have been so different. If industry regulation and smart meters actually worked, we would not need ANY energy supply companies. Technology could have released us from the grip of the Big Six and stripped out the cost of “middlemen”. But it hasn’t.

Frazer Scott, CEO of Energy Action Scotland, says the industry’s glacial rollout of smart meters means he can’t see how RTS meters in Scotland – a quarter of the GB total – can all be replaced before Ofgem’s March 2025 deadline, let alone the June 2025 signal shutdown.

So, what’s the solution?

“Not a patchwork of replacement by a variety of suppliers dependent on people requesting meter changes driven by a fear of the signal failing but what should have happened in the first place – systematic street-by-street operations with consumer oversight. Given what’s happened it’s important an independent body like Consumer Scotland or Citizens Advice Scotland has an active role.”

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Bizarrely, it seems that energy firms sharing the job – collective shared installing – is legislatively impossible because of Ofgem rules. According to Scott, this must change.

So, there are six months at most.

If the RTS signal is switched off and meters haven’t been upgraded, heating and hot water will stay on for some customers with bills spiralling while others will be left without heat.

It’s Westminster that can stop that happening. But the Scottish Government should be piling on the pressure. I’d wager that if Alex Salmond was First Minister, this would already be a cross-party campaign. So, let’s see some action.

And see if Scotland’s 37 Labour MPs can avoid a repeat of the Winter Heating Payment debacle and do something to help the poorest Scots. Fast.