AS A member of the Public Accounts Committee in Parliament, it is my job to scrutinise the detail of Government spending and assess whether it is offering value for money.

There has been a lot of interest in rising energy bills and last week we looked at the plan to install smart meters in all households by 2019.

The proposition is that every household is fitted with a meter for both gas and electricity, so households can reduce their energy consumption. The cost of the installation will be borne by customers. The cost of fitting the meters is £240 and they will reduce energy consumption by £23 per household a year.

Not a great deal is it? And not the most effective way of reducing consumption either. This is a perfect example of where the policy is not achieving what is intended. It’s a tax on consumers.

Apparently the policy was adopted to implement an EU directive. But that is not quite true. The EU directive was to fit smart meters for electricity in 80 per cent of households and to consider installation of meters for gas.

But, as usual, Whitehall has got over excited and is over implementing the directive. Unsurprisingly no other country is implementing the directive the same way we are. And guess what, if we just did electricity it would only cost £104 per meter.

The Department for Energy and Climate Change thinks we need smart meters for gas to tell us how much money we have wasted by leaving our heating on all day. I suggested most people are well used to using thermostats and timers to manage their heating use and reduce their bills.

The committee will ask Government to think again about this policy, but it does offer a good example of how Government does get things wrong and how it over implements EU regulations. We need to get a whole lot smarter about all this.