local councils are failing to invest in electric car charging infrastructure, according to damning new research.
Of the 216 local authorities (covering 60 per cent of the UK population) that responded to a freedom-of-information request by DevicePilot, 52 per cent have spent no money on EV charging infrastructure in the past 12 months. This is in spite of the government continuing to provide funding through its on-street residential chargepoint scheme.
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Nevertheless, the demand for chargers is there; 60 per cent of responding councils received complaints from the public about the availability, reliability or number of charging points in their areas over the same 12-month period.
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To make matters worse, 48 per cent of the local authorities said they either didn’t know how many chargepoints they were going to install in 2022 or were planning to install none at all. On average, councils are planning to install only 52 chargers each by the end of 2022.
London councils are far more proactive than those elsewhere, it appears. local authorities in the capital spent £204,000 on chargers in 2021, more than double the national average, and are planning an average of 39 new chargers per 100,000 people in 2022, compared with a national average of nine per 100,000 people.