Mr. Douglas Millican:

The example I gave of the tap left running was an isolated case I came across on one of the islands. It is undoubtedly a policy choice on the part of the Scottish Government to support an unmeasured household charging structure. It did that for reasons of social policy and to support affordability, especially for low-income households. It is also to support a lower total system charge because we do not have the costs of the metering infrastructure and that benefits our customers. Scotland has one third of the Great Britain landmass but its household charges are the second lowest in Great Britain and that shows the benefits to every customer of avoiding the overheads of the metering infrastructure.

All the charges for putting in a meter are regulated by our economic regulator to reflect the cost of installing meters. If we installed meters in ones and twos the unit cost would be much higher than for a company doing a full, street by street, meter roll-out programme with its economies of scale.