Charger roll-out could be even faster if we cut the red tape, says ChargeUK
We sat down with ChargeUK’s head of policy Jarrod Birch to hear about the progress in the UK’s public charging network and the obstacles to even more rapid growth
How has the UK’s charging sector grown in the last 12 months, and how do you see it growing under Keir Starmer’s government?
2024 was a real blockbuster year for the charging sector. We saw nearly 20,000 chargers added to the public charging network last year, more than any previous year. That brings us, at the time of speaking, up to 75,000 chargers overall in the UK.
That’s a colossal number but there are a couple of great stats that bring it to life even more. The first is that if you go back just three years to 2021 we were installing around 7,500 charges per year. So we’ve gone from 7,500 to 20,000 per year in just a three-year period.
The other one I like most is from a piece of analysis we did last summer and we found that one in three of the chargers in the network at that point had been installed in the last 12 months. So if you’re using a charger on the go, particularly an ultra-rapid or a rapid, there’s a pretty good chance it was installed really recently. So we’re in the middle of a charge point boom.
Is the Labour government friendlier than the Conservatives to ChargeUK’s mission?
It’s a great question. Notwithstanding the move to the 2030 phase-out date – which was a real kicker for us in terms of investment and investment certainty – on policy and communications challenges that we face as a sector, I can’t say for sure that one party has been any friendlier to the to us than the other. Both have been really constructive, productive relationships. There’s lots of things we worked with the previous government on that have helped to ease deployment barriers and we’re seeing similar thing with the new Labour government.
I think if I had to venture a difference between them, possibly it would be the benefit of a new government coming in with, five years ahead of itself, looking at the bigger, meatier issues that take a bit more time to sort out. For example, on grid connections that’s not a simple or quick problem to solve. And the benefit we’ve got of a new government is that they’ve got a long-term vision for that. But certainly not any difficulties with the previous government. We enjoyed working with them just as much as this new one.
Does the upcoming ZEV mandate have any impact on your mission?
It’s easy for the media in particular to look at the ZEV mandate and think, this is a priority only for automotive manufacturers. That it only affects them. And of course, to a certain extent, it does affect them more than anybody else. They are sales targets for the automotive manufacturers to hit and no one else. And of course they incur the fines if they fail to do but the mandate is really fundamental to charge operators as well.
Those increasing annual sales targets effectively tell us how many customers that we can expect on our chargers with every passing year. So that’s what operators’ investments are based upon. It’s on demand forecasts running up to 2035 and beyond. So what we’ve been saying very clearly to the government while the consultation has been open, and we’ll say in our response to the consultation as well, is that, any changes to that trajectory, which would result in fewer electric vehicles on the road, driving fewer electric miles, would result in a loss of investment, certainty and positivity from our side. Even if that might be what some automotive manufacturers are pushing for.
And so we’re being quite clear that weakening the mandate is not the right approach if we want a world-class charging network, as we’re trying to deliver. If you want to boost demand for EVs then please consider some demand-side incentives.
So what does the government need to do to encourage investment in infrastructure?
I think, by far in a way, the ZEV mandate is the most important thing. That’s what we’re hearing from our members who are investing over £6 billion by 2030. They say very clearly that the ZEV mandate is the most important thing.
But assuming and hoping that we get a good result from that consultation over the next few months, I think there’s probably two things I’d pull out in terms of barriers and opportunities that would help on the investment side.
The first is the relatively significant challenges that we have in getting infrastructure deployed quickly and smoothly. We’ve seen an awful lot of progress on this front since we were established as an association representing the sector in 2023. But it is still far slower to deploy infrastructure than it should be. And that’s true of charging infrastructure, but you see it also in debates around homes and other energy infrastructure projects as well.
A lot of the time we say that this is kind of bureaucracy for bureaucracy’s sake. A lot of the processes are just old fashioned processes that weren’t necessarily set up to handle what we’re trying to do. And so we think, streamlining it would be really helpful and would attract investment here rather than in other places because we could demonstrate that deploying infrastructure here is quicker than anywhere else.
The other thing I’d say is on renewable credits. At the risk of going into policy minutiae we think that as of spring 2025 the UK will be the only country in Europe and North America that doesn’t have some sort of mechanism to give credits to chargepoint operators for selling electricity to EVs.
In all those other places, you can get a credit that can be traded or sold with other parties in the market. And what we see in those markets is that if you have a scheme like that, charging operators generally will use them to reinvest in more charging infrastructures. They roll out more quickly, or they use it to justify investments in rural areas, where we know that charging infrastructure isn’t quite so common.
Or they use it to reduce prices for their customers because they’ve got an additional revenue stream that puts slightly less pressure on their costs. As you can imagine, we’ve been saying to the government for quite a while, we think it’s a risk for the UK to be left behind, and a similar scheme here would help to bring some of that investment here because we’ve got so many other advantages in terms of the workforce and some of the deployment opportunities in the UK.
Charge UK has a 12-point plan aimed at making charging an EV easier and as affordable as possible. What steps have been made towards this and how will EV ownership become easier and more affordable over the next 12 months?
Charging is already becoming easier every day. We’ve discussed that charge operators are rolling out a lot more infrastructure than they did in the past. And my experience is that the newer the charge point, the easier it is to use.
In terms of steps that have been, we have the public charge regulations which came into force last November and set new standards on the reliability of charging, on pricing, on open data and roaming.
And that’s something we’ve been really supportive of and really positive about, is setting a kind of minimum standard that everybody can expect wherever they go to charge, whatever type of charger it is.
There’s clearly loads more to do, and affordability is the question we hear very clearly from customers. We hear from drivers that many charging sessions are not as affordable as they would like them to be. And for some people are not affordable at all. That’s clearly something that we want to look keenly at.
When we’re talking about affordability, what we hear equally clearly from the other side of the equation, from charge operators, is that where prices have gone up this is generally being driven by very steeply rising costs on the part of operators, especially on the energy side.
Everybody has seen electricity prices have gone up since the Ukraine war. They are starting to come down a little but unfortunately for chargement operators, unlike domestic consumers they do not enjoy the benefits of a price cap, which shields them from rising prices to a certain extent. Electricity prices are higher than they were before the Ukraine war.
The other, and I think this is actually more important, but gets talked about a lot less because, is the rise in standing and capacity charges. For operators, those charges have gone up several thousand percent since 2022 due to regulatory changes The impact of that has been that, from a position where standing charges made up quite a minor part of the public charging price for a driver, they now constitute a very significant and rising amount of that price incurred by the driver.
So what we’re saying to government and Ofgem is, help us reduce these costs and we can help bring down prices as far as we can.
We’ve heard renewed calls to reduce VAT on public charging. Do you think this would help promote the broader adoption of EVs in the UK?
I think it’s unquestionable. If you take a rapid charging session which costs anywhere between 80p and 90p per kilowatt hour, then VAT is around 15p of that price. If you remove that from that session, I think it dwarfs any of the suggestions that we are seeing as part of the ZEV mandate conversation, where people are talking about relatively minor tax cuts to help people justify the transition.
I think 15p off a DC charging session would be an absolutely massive help to that more so than anything else. So it’s something we’re really keen on.
What are ChargeUK’s targets for 2025?
The main thing for us as a relatively young representative body is to continue to scale who we represent. We now represent over 40 different charging companies, motorway service providers and associated partners. That’s a far cry from the handful that we founded the organization with and about 75% of the sector. But we’d love to represent as much of the sector as possible.
The other thing we’re really focusing on this year is positive messaging around EVs.
That’s something everybody involved in the sector is really keen to nail this year. We’ve had a really tough few months with all the debates around the ZEV mandate, which has brought into question some parts of the transition in a way that we want to avoid.
So a big focus for us this year is working with other people in the space to promote a positive message to come out of the other end of this consultation and say ‘we’re all on one page now, full steam ahead, we’re transitioning to EVs, it’s going to get better and we’re going to go as quickly as we can’.
