Dr. Pete Lunn:

I accept the point but we have done research on how people respond to smart meter tariffs and they find them incredibly difficult to understand. If we give them a pattern of usage that is fair usage and we give them smart meter tariffs and tell them to pick the right tariff for them on that pattern of usage, a large majority of people cannot do it. We published a paper on energy policy on this. Why can people not do it? It is just too complicated and difficult for people in ordinary life to do. The problem is that the behavioural science is how we can simplify that problem in a way that genuinely affects people's behaviour and drops emissions. The answer to that has to be some kind of internal feedback system within the house that is simplified and that they can understand and that we put money into researching and testing in order that people can change their behaviour in simple and easy ways. The problem is that even giving them the correct economic incentives, as if were, is not enough if they cannot interface with the system in a way that allows them to change behaviour. That is the reason there is an argument within behavioural science about the power of nudging and you can probably get from this which side of it my unit and I tend to sit on. Nudging is an important thing, and it has made a real difference to the impact of behavioural science in policy but nudging is not going to help us solve climate change in a major way. It has got to be about how people interface with system change.