Smart meters won't solve water efficiency alone, Behaviour change will.

The UK water sector is entering a decisive decade. With England projected to face a shortfall of around five billion litres of water a day by the 2050s, demand reduction is no longer a supporting activity; it is central to long-term resilience.

Significant progress is being made. Smart metering programmes are scaling, leakage is under increased scrutiny, and new infrastructure is being planned. But an uncomfortable reality is emerging: while these interventions can trigger behaviour change, they do not guarantee it will last after the initial moment of awareness has passed.

The risk is that the sector mistakes measurement for management. A smart meter can show that consumption has changed, but it cannot by itself explain whether that change came from a repaired leak, a temporary weather effect, a household routine, or a customer consciously using less. The value is created in the next step: interpreting the pattern, identifying the most useful intervention, and tracking whether the response has actually changed behaviour over time.

The real test for the sector is not whether smart meters can prompt customers to use less water. They can. The harder question is whether those reductions can be sustained.

One of the biggest risks is the “bounceback” effect. A customer receives new information, changes behaviour for a period, and consumption falls. But once the novelty fades, the prompt disappears or the customer no longer sees the relevance, old routines return. For water companies, that means the real performance question is not just how many customers respond to an intervention, but how many still behave differently three, six or twelve months later.

This is because its not simply a technology challenge, it’s a human one.

Data can provide visibility, identify opportunities and offer feedback, but it does not automatically reshape habits. Most household water use is driven by routines that are repeated every day. Lasting reductions come not from information alone, but from turning awareness into behaviours that become embedded over time.

That is why the next stage of water efficiency needs to be much more segmented. Some customers may only need reassurance that their usage is already efficient. Others may need a leak alert, a comparison with similar homes, a seasonal prompt, an appliance-specific recommendation, or support to understand why continuous flow is occurring. Treating every customer as if they need the same message risks wasting effort and losing attention. The real opportunity is to use smart meter data to decide which journey each customer should be on.

The energy sector learned this lesson years ago. Smart meters improved visibility and engagement, but the most meaningful and enduring outcomes came where customers were continuously supported, informed and encouraged to maintain new behaviours. Technology enabled change, but ongoing engagement made it stick. The same lesson applies to water. Smart meters should not be treated as the end point of a water efficiency strategy. They should be treated as the start of a continuous customer journey.

This challenge is becoming increasingly urgent. The Environment Agency report that the average household water consumption in England remains above 136 litres per person per day, with policy ambitions point towards reducing consumption closer to 110 litres per person per day by 2050. Closing that gap will require more than metering programmes, campaigns or one-off customer messages. It will require a sustained ability to identify where change is possible, intervene at the right moment, and measure whether that change has endured.

As Ofwat and the wider sector place increasing emphasis on demand reduction, behaviour change can no longer be viewed simply as a customer engagement activity. It needs to become a core operational capability. Success will come from using data to identify high-impact behaviours, delivering personalised interventions at the right time, and maintaining continuous engagement that helps customers build lasting habits. That means combining smart metering with data analytics, behavioural science and customer engagement to turn insight into lasting action.

The infrastructure is being put in place. Millions of smart meters will provide unprecedented visibility of water consumption. But the real transformation will not be defined by how much data the sector collects, it will be defined by how effectively that data is turned into action.

The next decade won't be won by the organisations with the most meter data.

It will be won by those that turn data into lasting customer habits and deliver water efficiency at scale. That's why the conversation now needs to move beyond smart metering alone and focus on how data, behavioural science and customer engagement work together. At Calisen, that's exactly the capability we deliver through Advizzo, reflecting a simple belief: the value of smart metering is not just in what it reveals, but in the action it enables, the habits it helps sustain and the measurable reductions it can support at scale.