Government doubles council founding for EV chargepoints

The Department for Transport (DfT) will double council funding for residential EV chargepoints to £10m.

The money will be open to all local authorities and it’s hoped it could help fund 3,600 new chargepoints across the country.

There are currently 24,000 publicly available chargepoints, of which over 2,400 have a ‘rapid’ charge.

The department is also looking at how to make information about all public chargepoints including locations and power ratings openly available in a standard format for the first time.

They want to look at how real-time information could be published, showing whether chargepoints are in working order and currently in use, which could then be used by developers and incorporated into sat navs and route mapping apps.

In November, the DfT published a local authority ‘league table’ for EV chargepoints, that revealed 100 councils have fewer than 10 public charging points per 100,000 people.

Nationally, London leads the way with almost 4,000 places for members of the public to charge their EV. Scotland also fares well, with over 1,500 points. Most of Scotland is also in the top 20% for areas best served by EV charge points.

Glasgow, Manchester and Liverpool city councils were praised for being the best performing councils when it comes to installing EV infrastructure.

Barrow-in-Furness in Cumbria, one of the most deprived areas of the country, has no EV chargepoints. Rugby has 3 and Hartlepool has 6.

Transport Secretary Grant Shapps said: ‘We want to make electric cars the new normal, and ensuring drivers have convenient places to charge is key to that.

‘By doubling funding again for chargepoints on streets where people live and opening up data we are helping drivers easily locate and use.’