Electric car charging points ‘spread too unequally across UK’
The UK car industry has warned of a “growing regional divide” in the provision of electric car chargers, as it called for a new regulator to oversee legally binding targets for charger installation.
The number of publicly available chargers has not grown fast enough to keep up with the soaring number of battery-powered electric cars on British roads, according to the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT), a lobby group. Public charger numbers rose by 82% between 2019 and 2021, but this pales in comparison with the 600% jump in the number of electric cars during the same period.
The disparity between the number of chargers and cars is growing faster in the north of England than in the south, the SMMT said.
Unequal charger provision across the country has long been a concern for the industry and analysts, with fears that customers will be put off buying new electric vehicles if they do not have a place to charge them regularly. A third of the UK’s households – mainly in towns and cities – do not have their own dedicated parking space where a private charge point could be installed.
Investors, led by the oil companies Shell and BP and the French energy company EDF, are pouring money into the public charger industry. Nevertheless, those investments have overwhelmingly targeted wealthier areas of the country, led by London, as well as rapid chargers for fast recharging on popular routes. The UK has more rapid chargers per electric vehicle than any other nation barring China, South Korea and Japan, the SMMT said.
That has left some parts of the country underserved. Greater Manchester has only 17 chargers per 100,000 people, compared with 102 per 100,000 in London, according to data from ZapMap that are relied upon by
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