NEWS

The UK smart meter rollout is no longer about rapid expansion. After many fraught years of delays, lockdowns and technical issues, we’re now at the stage where most straightforward installations have already happened. The government now openly acknowledges that the remaining customers are becoming ‘less engaged and harder to reach’ as the rollout progresses. As a result, the aims of the rollout are changing. 

Under the government’s new smart metering framework, suppliers must continue taking ‘all reasonable steps’ to complete the rollout by 2030. However, on the ground, suppliers must be realistic. Installation rates are likely to slow, the cost per installation will rise, and the return on investment from each additional SMETS2 meter is becoming weaker.

At the same time, suppliers face growing pressure to maintain the existing smart meter network. Reliability, communication performance and customer service now sit much closer to the centre of policy. In this article, we’ll explain this shift from expansion to long-term management in more detail.

Hitting those hard-to-reach customers

Earlier phases of the rollout focused on volume. Suppliers could prioritise customers who actively wanted smart meters, as well as properties where installations were easier to complete. But now, those customers all have their smart meters – and the remaining pool looks very different.

The government highlights the growing challenge of consumer engagement in the later stages of the rollout. Many of the households still without smart meters may be reluctant to engage, difficult to contact or operationally more complex to reach. This makes life difficult for suppliers. To get smart meters into those properties, they may now need:

• More customer contact attempts before securing an appointment
• Longer times for engineers to complete installations
• Greater operational planning for difficult properties
• Larger teams in the field to hit previous installation volumes 

The government recognises this challenge in its move away from rigid annual installation targets. Instead, suppliers must now take ‘all reasonable steps’ towards the 2030 deadline. That flexibility matters because rollout conditions are no longer consistent across the market. Labour constraints, technical limitations and customer engagement issues all affect delivery.

All in all, the rollout is still moving forward, but it is now entering a slower and more expensive phase.

Focus on operational performance

The government’s new framework makes another shift clear: smart metering policy no longer focuses purely on installation numbers. Moving forward, there will be greater attention on operational performance.

With so many smart meters now installed and delivering benefits, suppliers are now obliged to spend more time ensuring meters continue to function in smart mode. That includes communication reliability, fault resolution and proactive maintenance. If a meter stops operating properly in smart mode, suppliers must now take all reasonable steps to restore smart functionality within 90 days. The framework also places greater focus on replacing communications hubs before 2G and 3G mobile networks are switched off.

The government also confirmed:

• Annual deployment plans for suppliers
• Binding milestones from January 2027
• Greater oversight and enforcement from Ofgem
• Stronger accountability around meter performance

This makes sense. As well as delivering benefits for consumers, including visibility into their energy use and no more manual meter readings, smart meters generate valuable data for forecasting, network balancing, and system management across the wider industry. Keeping that infrastructure operational now carries more strategic value than it did during the earlier rollout years.

The balancing act

The industry now has two major responsibilities running in parallel. First, suppliers must continue progressing towards the government’s 2030 rollout objective. Second, they must maintain, repair, and proactively replace parts of the smart metering network already in service.

This is a balancing act, with those responsibilities competing for the same operational resources. Installation programmes still require engineers, scheduling capacity and customer engagement teams. At the same time, maintenance workloads are growing as the installed base expands and communications infrastructure ages. To make things even more complex, recent Guaranteed Standards of Performance changes introduced automatic compensation for installation delays, missed appointments and poor fault handling.

The challenge now is not simply deploying more meters. It is managing a national smart infrastructure network at scale while rollout activity continues in the background. The government framework reflects that reality. Policy increasingly focuses on resilience, functionality and long-term performance rather than deployment volume alone.

Looking to the future

The smart meter rollout is entering a more mature stage. The UK already has millions of smart meters operating across the network. Long-term success now depends on keeping those meters connected, functional and delivering value over time. The remaining installations are becoming harder to deliver and more expensive to secure. At the same time, the operational demands of supporting the existing smart meter network continue to grow.

The government’s post-2025 framework acknowledges that shift. Suppliers still need to pursue rollout progress, but reliability and performance now carry far greater weight. This is a sensible direction for the industry.