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

Control of Britain’s 39m smart meters passes to non-profit startup The handover marks the end of a 13-year licence for Smart DCC, a subsidiary of Capita, after years of spiralling costs and delays

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Ministers had initially hoped that all households would have a smart meter before 2020 to help modernise Britain’s outdated energy system and make better use of renewable energy and innovative data-led energy tariffs .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.