SFHA responds to consultation on the Radio Teleswitch Service

Ofgem have been consulting on additional protections for Radio Teleswitch Service (RTS) customers ahead of the planned shutdown of the RTS infrastructure on 30 June 2025.

The proposed license changes aim to prevent supply disruption and protect those transitioning to new meters and tariffs from higher costs. This will introduce various includes the following obligations on suppliers following the shutdown, including:

• the licensee cannot supply electricity to premises that rely on RTS technology
• the licensee must take all reasonable steps to replace the RTS meter within 30 working days when a consumer switches supplier
• the licensee must take all reasonable steps to provide a tariff that leaves the consumer ‘no worse off’ than their existing arrangement as a result of an RTS meter upgrade

SFHA’s response welcomes the overall intention of safeguarding consumers beyond June 2025, particularly the commitment that customers will be ‘no worse off’. However, we are concerned that the current proposals do not go far enough in protecting this group from detriment and there remain questions about how these proposals will work in practice.

We are particularly concerned about any proposal which suggests cutting off electricity supply to individual homes following the shutdown of the RTS infrastructure. This appears contradictory to the proposals elsewhere in the document regarding protecting consumers and it is also unclear in which circumstances this would actually apply given the exceptions noted.

With around 160,000 meters still to be upgraded in Scotland, and the limited progress in recent months, we are concerned that the number of households who could be negatively impacted by the RTS shutdown is significant.

We have noted that the social housing sector is willing to help address some of the engagement barriers and many have already been working hard to support tenants with meter replacements. However, landlords are limited in their ability to identify individual RTS customers, and while some of our members have been working with suppliers to identify those who still require an upgrade, we would like to see this activity applied on a much large scale.

Our full response can be found here and further updates on RTS will be provided via SFHA’s Energy and Net Zero forum. Please contact Cassandra Dove (cdove@sfha.co.uk) if you have any questions or would like to be added to the Energy and Net Zero mailing list.