Utility Week

UTILITY WEEK | APRIL 2022 | 21 Customers Ofwat to add customer condition to licences Ruth Williams Ofwat is looking to add a customer- focused condition to water companies' licences to incentivise customer service. Speaking at the summit, Ofwat senior director Claire Forbes said the regulator is keen to co-create the licence condition with companies, consumer groups and other stakeholders before consulting on it towards the end of this year. "We're starting to talk this year about a customer-focused licence condition to go into company licences as another tool in our toolkit to help increase the customer focus and incentivise companies to do that," Forbes explained. The proposal was welcomed by War- ren Buckley, retail director at Thames Water, who said he was "all for it" if it helped consumers. "At its core, my job is to improve what we do for customers so I will be really interested to see what it includes for cus- tomers," Buckley said. He said he would welcome any change that could facilitate discussions and sup- port among executive teams to reƒ ect Ofwat's focus on customers via a licence condition: "I will use it in any way I can if it helps me achieve my goals. The reason I do my job is because I'm passionate about customers, so I'm all for it." This was echoed by South East Water's chief executive David Hinton, who said promoting the "right behaviours" within companies is essential, but stressed that any such addition should not constrain innovation within companies. The initiative was a recommendation made by CCW in its a‡ ordability review. The water watchdog's Rob Light told Util- ity Week that Ofwat developing this idea shows that "the regulator was listening to CCW more than it ever has before". Smart meter rollout continues to frustrate Adam John Mandating landlords to install smart meters in the properties they manage could help the UK reach its smart meter target, an energy chief suggested. Philippe Commaret, managing director of EDF Energy's retail business, talked about the issues facing the smart meter rollout dur- ing his presentation and the panel session that followed. Commaret said there had been a lot of negativity about the rollout in the national press, with stories about the devices being unable to communicate properly. "The rollout of smart meters is tricky. In the press, we face a lot of di' culties and we believe that there is a way to make smart meters much more accessible," he said. He continued: "As an example, when houses are being rented, it could be manda- tory to have a smart meter installed in those households and so increase the accessibility for people who are renting these premises to have a smart meter and to have access to the technology that sits behind them." According to recently released ' gures by the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (BEIS), smart and advanced meters made up 50% of all oper- ational energy meters by the end of 2021 – a seven percentage point increase from a yearœbefore. During a panel session, Commaret was asked about communicating the bene' ts of the devices more e‡ ectively. The retail boss, who came to the UK až er working in France as EDF's director of sales, expressed some of his concerns about how the UK's rollout has fared compared to that of France. He said: "My biggest struggle when I came to the UK two years ago was to under- stand why: why the problem of smart meter- ing is a big failure, why the cost of rolling out half of the smart meters that we need to roll out is three times higher than to roll out smart meters in France?" "Why such a problem, such a waste of money, a waste of time for implement- ing infrastructure which is so important?" heœasked. Commaret said while the vast majority of EDF's installed smart meters are working properly, a signi' cant portion (7%) are not. He continued: "We have to address this question of communication obviously, but we ' rst have to ' x the question of why those smart meters are not working. "We have to address also the question of the cost for that and we need support. We need to change gear in the smart metering rollout because we are the only country in fact where the customer will decide if they want a meter to be installed." Also on the panel was Eon UK chief executive Michael Lewis, who said the rollout had been a source of "immense frustration". He said: "Why is it so expensive in the UK compared to other countries? The origi- nal sin was it was given to retailers and not the network companies way back nearly two decades ago. But once you went down the route of saying it's up to retailers, for the right reason that we wanted to engage customers, then you have to do it prop- erly and you have to make the underlying systemsœwork." Lewis described some of the challenges the rollout has faced, including the failure of a large number of ' rst-generation SMETS1 devices to work properly. He said the com- plications had been "grist to the mill of the Daily Mail" which he said wanted "any story that was negative about smart meters". "The good news is we are actually through a lot of that, and we are now in a position where we are rolling out SMETS2 meters at scale. The overwhelming mes- sage from customers is very, very posi- tive when we install the smart meter. So I think we are over that hump of negativity," he added. Customer Summit Event Partner: Localz Headline Sponsor: Capita Co-Sponsors: Content Guru Gentrack Mastercard Smart Energy Water Vyntelligence

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