A new report has revealed significant disparities between local authority areas in electric vehicle (EV) charging provision for EV owners without off-street parking.
In some areas, the vast majority of ‘on-street’ households have a public charger within a five-minute walk, while the figure is less than 10% in others.
Net zero data analytics consultancy Field Dynamics, in collaboration with Zapmap, found a 60% increase in the number of charger locations in Great Britain between 2022 and 2024.
It looked at the charging facilities available for the 9.3 million households (32.7% of the housing stock) without access to off-street parking and calculated the percentage with a public charger within a five-minute walk, finding that more than three quarters do not.
Nationally 24.8% of these ‘on-street households’ have a charger within five minutes (up from 17.2%) in 2022, with Scotland having the highest average coverage at 28.7%, followed by England at 24.5% and Wales at 21.9%.
These percentages were also calculated for each local authority, with 99% of on-street households in London boroughs Kensington and Chelsea, Southwark, and Westminster found to be within a five-minute walk of a charger
For the capital as a whole the figure is 67%, which compares with 83% coverage in Brighton and Hove, 76% in Coventry and 58% in Portsmouth.
However, almost 90% of all local authorities cover less than 40% of their on-street households and more than half cover less than 20%, with 38 local authorities having less than 10% coverage.
The report calculates that if these 38 authorities continue to increase coverage at the same rate as in the last two years, by 2030 over 75% of them would remain below 20% coverage.
Where on-street households in London are covered by at least one charger, they typically have more than six charging locations within the five-minute walk, while the national average is less than two.
