Ok but the industry themselves had lobbyists who persistently lobbied successive Govs to bring this tech in and they eventually got their way in. We weren't the first. USA had quite a few years head start on us in bringing about the forced installation of smart meters. I remember youtube hopping back in the day and I'd never heard of smart meters and yet US homeowners were posting vids going apoplectic about them and the utility company 'spy' issue they posed.
Not surprised they did, old meters are fairly archaic - the idea you had people employed to go and read what dials said so someone can raise a bill, or send a metering op out because of an issue with the meter. Auto reads giving granular detail are a big improvement for customer and supplier - I see my energy use in half hourly increments using Home Assistant and I get value out of that.
People with issues can have them remotely diagnosed and sometimes fixed remotely, if they do need a metering operative appointment it still happens
Prepayment customer it's a paradigm shift. Sheen inadequate prepayment it was a nightmare having to go to the shop to top up, assuming they're open. Someone would always forget to say they had used emergency credit so we'd have to wait til morning to go get credit
Prepayment customers can now at uk auto top ups, credit alerts, top uk via mobile app, have credit added remotely by supplier etc. all very good stuff
3rd party access to consumer data will be good as well as will help with switching.
More people switch now than they used to. Even back in 2016, close to 70% of people sat on expensive standard rate tariffs. Switching is more common now and will be going forward.
The whole smets1 thing was all about government targets to get meters on walls with a view to updating them later, suppliers would have happily brought it all in later when it was ready, but the complication was the targets from government and the governing organisation, the DCC, ran by Capita, having to be up and running and ready to operate
We've had a smart meter for 5 years and it was a smets1 meter for 4 of them, we switched soon as we moved in - meter still worked, no hardship, still saw kWh usage via IHD and used that for meter reads, we just had to submit them, no worse off than we were with old meter and better off in some ways