The Government has said that the thresholds at which businesses qualify for smart metering are too low. And the error has been repeated ever since it was first set out in the 2006 Energy White Paper.

At the beginning of April, the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR) said that it been made aware “of a typographical error in respect of the business gas market” and that “that error ran through from the Energy White Paper into the consultation document”. Both these documents referred to the threshold for gas sites as being 73,200kWh per annum – the point at which smart metering would be introduced to customers. But the Government let it be known, in an email with a very limited circulation, that they believed the figure should have been 732,000kWh – an error of an order of magnitude. In addition, the consultation had been carried out under what the

Department now terms an erroneous figure. The conclusions of this consultation are imminent but the Government appears still to be moving the goalposts. Industry figures suggest that this will mean that only SMEs with a total utility bill (electricity, gas and water) of around £30,000 per annum will now receive smart metering, instead of the £7,500-£8,000 upon which the consultation was posited.