While the number of public chargers jumped by 46 per cent in the year to July 2023, there appears to be a growing number of what regulators refer to as “charging deserts”, particularly outside cities.
The average gap between London’s coverage and the rest of UK is growing – up from a 32-percentage points difference in 2020 to a 47 percentage this year and in 38 local authorities, less than 10% of households have parking covered by the public charger network.
Commenting Craig Stephenson, the managing director of Field Dynamics, said that councils should be “making sure they are covering not just the areas with high EV adoption at the moment, but looking to provide infrastructure across their boundaries”.
In the UK there is a significant divide between those who can charge at home, and those who have to rely on the public network.
Using an algorithm and Ordnance Survey data to find “parkable” parcels Field Dynamics worked out that 9.3m of the 28.4m households in the UK did not have parkable off-street land where they could install their own charger. Then by using public charger data from ZapMap, it worked out how many of those households were more than five minutes from a public charger.
For many living in towns and villages, particularly in places laid out before car ownership became widespread from the late 1950s onwards, access to charging stations is limited.
Among the worst served areas are North-east Derbyshire which covers just 1.3% of “on-street” households, while in Redditch only 3.2% of on-street households are covered.
Westminster, and Kensington and Chelsea, by contrast, cover 99% of households. London also has four times more chargers per household than the rest of the UK.
Some towns outside on London are doing well with Brighton having 83% coverage, while Coventry has 76% coverage and Portsmouth 58%.
Quentin Willson, the founder of the FairCharge group campaigning for electric cars warned that local authorities need more government support and private-sector guidance on the technicalities of building future-proofed infrastructure. He also said they needed easier access to the government’s £450m Levi (local electric vehicle infrastructure) funding.
According to Wilson if government doesn’t help and support local authorities, then the local infrastructure rollout will stay regionally patchy and inconsistent.
The top 10 local authorities are all in London
Kensington and Chelsea, 99%; Southwark, 99%; Westminster, 99%; Islington, 98%; Hammersmith and Fulham, 97%; Camden, 96%; Merton, 95%; Hackney, 94%; Waltham Forest, 91%; Lambeth, 91%.
The top 10 local authorities outside London
Brighton and Hove, 83%; Coventry, 76%; Portsmouth, 58%; East Lothian, 54%; Watford, 54%; Liverpool, 53%; Clackmannanshire, 49%; Shetland Islands, 48%; Exeter, 44%; Orkney Islands, 44%.
The bottom 10 local authorities
North-east Derbyshire, 1.3%; Redditch, 3.2%; Neath Port Talbot, 3.4%; Brentwood, 3.6%; Sefton, 3.7%; Fenland, 3.8%; Basildon, 3.8%; Bolsover, 4.1%; Walsall, 5.1%; Mansfield, 5.1%
