- A new report on public chargepoints for electric vehicles, undertaken by the UK’s independent public spending watchdog, the National Audit Office, has laid out the government’s current progress in growing the country’s public charging infrastructure.
- The report finds that at current estimated trajectories, the government is on track to meet a target of 300,000 public chargers by 2030 – a number that currently stands at 64,632.
- 100,000 of these chargers are predicted to be partly supported by the Local Electric Vehicle Infrastructure fund, underlining the key role government plays in helping the wider charging industry achieve this target.
How is UK charging infrastructure progressing?
The report, which can be read in full here, also highlights the rapid growth of ultra-rapid chargepoints. There is currently a 2030 target to have 2,500 ultra-rapid chargepoints within one mile of the ‘strategic road network, comprising of the key A roads and motorways that line the country. As of July 2024, this number already stood at 2,337, showing impressive progress here.
Whilst the UK is on track to hit this impressive number, there is a notable disparity in the placement of these current chargers. Within England specifically, as of July 2024, only 15% of public chargepoints were located in rural areas. 44% of all public chargers in the UK are located within London and the South-East, while London itself has twice as many chargepoints per capita than any other UK region. Scotland still performed relatively strongly, with 103 public chargepoints per 100,000 people.
Public charging is just one piece in the puzzle of mass EV adoption, however. The relatively lower price of charging at home makes EV ownership an ever more attractive proposition, for those who have the space to charge at home. According to the report, 32% of UK homes do not have driveways or garages, making home charging difficult. Many CPOs have called for VAT on public charging to be slashed from 20% to 5%, in line with the VAT placed on domestic charging, though this was not adjusted in the recent budget. In light of this, solutions to make charging at home viable for an even larger proportion of people will also be important for reaching the 2030 ZEV sales mandate. The report outlined key schemes for this, such as cross-pavement cables, and public chargepoints installed both on local streets and in local car parks.
