Mr. John Melvin:

I will not argue with the Deputy on the numbers. With regard to the number of customers who are actively using the smart services, that is a smaller number.

I will look across to my colleague and say it would have been in the tens of thousands. I am told it would have been around 40,000 plus of those customers. What we are doing to prompt customers to let them know of the potential benefits of engaging with the smart meters on their walls involved creating a smart metering services primer with the help of the ESRI. This was a piece of information that was tested using customer behaviour trials where different types of information were tested to see whether they would prompt customers to make these changes. Would a table or graphic prompt customers to make these changes? A rigorous assessment process as to the effectiveness of these primers was put together with the ESRI in late 2020 and early 2021.

There will be a requirement on suppliers to issue this smart services primer to customers with smart meters. The requirement to issue this primer is time-bound. Smart meters can assist customers. In customer behaviour trials that formed the early part of the smart metering programme, the smart meters enabled customers to reduce peak consumption by something in the order of 8% and to obtain an annual saving of the order of 2%. Both those figures were tested robustly through the customer behaviour trials.

Regarding sharing detailed data with a supplier, however, this is taken to be personal data and, therefore, does come under the GDPR. What we can do is seek to encourage customers to use the meters on the wall and to use them to use less energy and less expensive energy and, if they have the full half hour data, to potentially use more energy when the carbon intensity of the grid is low. More and more consumers will need to be engaged with the energy system for the transition to be successful. That is as much as I can add at the moment.