There is no question that the UK’s electric vehicle charging infrastructure has improved. There is also no question that it has not improved enough.
It’s hard to cut through the noise – or roar – that is this topic, because of its omnipresence and the queue of experts, genuine or spurious, keen to impart their views or debunk others, so we thought we would start with some old favourite sources, to get a proper handle on where the country’s charging network is up to in relation to the number of plug-in cars.
Charging app Zap Map, said there were 42,566 electric vehicle charging points across the UK, across 24,909 charging locations at the end of April – a 37% year-on-year increase. The network grew fourfold between 2016 and 2022 from 6,500 to more than 37,261 devices and the big three providers are Ubitricity, Pod Point, and BP Pulse.
The government’s Powering Up Britain strategy, announced on 30 March, promised to boost public charging facilities with a £350 million investment. It said it would be funded “in partnership with industry. and by our capital allowances reforms to boost investment with the introduction of full expensing for three years”.
Writing in the government’s accompanying Taking charge: the electric vehicle infrastructure strategy document, the secretary of state for transport said, “we expect around 300,000 public chargers as a minimum by 2030.” If the government is to meet that target, public charge points must increase by 605% and 257,434 units
between Zap Map’s end-of-April figure and the end of the decade. That equates to 36,776 new chargers per year – an 86% year-on-year increase, every year, until 2030.
Year-to-date battery-electric car sales reached 96,755 units at the end of April, up 25.6% year-on-year with a market share of 15.4%. Though typically less reliant on the public charging network, plug-in hybrids were up 11.5% to 40,360 units and a market share of 6.4%. Collectively, that is 137,115 plug-in cars registered in the first four
months of 2023, which dovetails from 368,617 registrations in 2022.
A good chunk of those – and the ones that came before them – will no doubt have the safety net of home and workplace chargers, the cheapest and most effective routes to the fleet consultants’ favourite phrase ‘ABC – Always Be Charging’. However, the aforementioned figures will not inspire huge confidence in anyone who has to deviate from that format – say, with a long journey to an unfamiliar location – and less still those who lack home charging facilities.
The government’s own figures suggest around 40% of the UK’s 33 million cars are parked on the street, while research by Zap Map and Field Dynamics published in July 2022, claimed the percentage of households without the space to charge at their own property, but who live within five minutes’ walk of a public EV charger, had risen from 12% to 17% since 2020 – a 40% increase.
In short, the rise in public charge points is in no way commensurate with that of plug-in vehicle sales. It is not uncommon to pull up at an overcrowded charging station today, and unless the government gets somewhere near its optimistic target, we could be in for queues reminiscent of petrol station fuel shortages – or worse, early pandemic-style bust-ups over toilet roll, if increasingly mainstream EV drivers lack the keen patience of early adopters.
Then there is the issue of reliability. The AFP’s manifesto called for a charge point regulator to hold operators accountable for the reliability and pricing of their units. On 28 April, it got its wish with the launch of Charge UK, a new trade body representing 18 of the country’s largest operators working in partnership with the government.
The AFP welcomed its inception: “It has appeared to us for some time that a much stronger sense of direction is needed than is currently being seen when it comes to charging,” said chair, Paul Hollick, “we have been arguing for the creation of a charging czar for some time and, if that isn’t going to happen, an industry body working alongside government is probably the next best solution. Without visibly viable public infrastructure in place, used EV buyers are being asked to take a chance on simply being able to charge their vehicles out on the road, which is simply unreasonable.”
On the face of it, this looks more promising than Westminster’s efforts, because the firms simultaneously pledged to invest more than £6billion in installing and operating EV charging infrastructure by the end of the decade. Collaboration between network operators has long been cited as critical to serious traction, and the body said it aimed to double the size of the charge point network in 2023. If that happens and momentum is sustained, it should get the figures on the right track, but this is more than just a numbers game. The organisation must prove its worth by ensuring that chargers actually work when you roll up.
The geographical concentration of public charge points also needs to be at the top of ChargeUK’s agenda. According to Zap Map figures, almost a third (31.6%) were in Greater London as of the end of April 2023, with 12.6% in Southeast England and 9.4% in Scotland. The dichotomy is that heavily populated metropolitan areas include a
greater proportion of people without driveways, for whom a home charger is not possible. Average incomes tend to be higher in major cities, too, so a greater proportion of residents are likely able to afford newer cars, themselves more likely to be plug-ins.
That makes the case for the capital but fails to explain why regions such as the West Midlands and the Northwest are not ranked higher on Zap Map’s list. The yin to the cities’ yang is that if access to chargers dries up in tandem with population density, it makes even those with long-range EVs and home chargers edgy ahead of a triple-digit trip into unchartered territory. Granted, the business case for a dozen ultra-fast chargers in a hamlet is slim, but some lateral thinking about the geographical spread of charge points is required if they are to effectively serve the public.
Scotland looks like a good model in this respect; third on Zap Map’s charge point concentration list, its population is around 10% of England’s, while Edinburgh has around 6.2% of London’s number of inhabitants. The devolved government has introduced permitted development rights for charging hubs and operates an interest-free used EV loan of up to £30,000 towards the purchase of a used electric car or van, or up to £5,000 for an electric motorcycle or moped. Westminster would do well to take a leaf (no pun intended) out of its book.
Finally, there is the cost of charging, which varies enormously depending on the car and the type of charge point. Public charging is almost certain to cost significantly more than home and workplace equivalents, as all energy prices shot up after the Ukraine war began in February 2022. However, public chargers came under the spotlight in January this year, when the RAC said the cost of rapid charging had risen by 50% in eight months.
“It now costs an average of 70.32p per kilowatt hour to rapid charge on a pay-as-you-go basis, up from 44.55p (58%) last May and from 63.29p (11%) last September,” said the organisation, “this is more than twice the cost of charging the same car at home. with the price of such a charge coming in at just £17.87 – despite the record-high domestic energy prices.”
Factor in the recent report from Which? that the UK’s fourth-largest charge point operator, GeniePoint, increased off-peak prices by 32%, The Telegraph’s story about a near 40% decrease in free public charge points – the kind typically offered by supermarkets – and the RAC’s May report that petrol prices fell below 145p per litre for the first time in 18 months (petrol still accounts for the lion’s share of new car sales at 42.6% year-to-date as of the end of April) and the cost case for public charging does not look great.
Hope may be on the horizon later this year. The House of Commons Library’s May publication Gas and electricity prices under the Energy Price Guarantee and beyond forecast that the Energy Price Cap – around £2,500 in Great Britain at the time of writing – would “fall to well below the [current] level in the second half of 2023.” Yes, that refers to household rates, which do not directly correspond to the public network, but it
seems unlikely that the government would issue such a harbinger if broader energy costs were not expected to fall.
The critical aspect – both in the coming months and longer term – will be if public charge point operators collectively reduce their prices as wholesale energy costs drop. If they do, they will carry favour with the public by distinguishing themselves from petrol station forecourts – which are often accused of failing to do the same when fuel prices soften – and represent better value and a more realistic proposition for electric car drivers.
