The UK government is currently aiming to ban the sale of new petrol and diesel cars by 2040 to encourage a switch to zero-emission electric vehicles.
However, that can’t happen unless there are enough places for us all to reliably charge up, so how does the electric vehicle charging infrastructure look around the UK?
We’ve analysed how many regular and rapid public charging points there are for every 100 electric cars in each local authority to find out.
Outside of London, Christchurch in Dorset was the area with the highest concentration of charging points, with 112 overall, which works out at 85.5 per 100 EVs, with West Somerset (65.2) and Fermanagh & Omagh (52.1) in second and third.
There was just one area in the UK without a single public charging point (aside from the tiny Isles of Scilly), which was Barrow-in-Furness in Cumbria.
Interestingly, while Peterborough has the second-highest number of electric vehicles (outside of London) it came third bottom for chargers per 100 EVs, with just 0.4.
Rank |
Local Authority |
County |
Number of electric vehicles |
Total |
Total |
Charging |
Rapid Devices |
---|
London is some way ahead of the rest of the country when it comes to charging infrastructure, with 28.8 charging points per 100 cars (compared to the national average of 12.5).
Aside from the business-focused City of London, which has an extremely low resident population, Wandsworth was the London borough with the highest availability of chargers, with 34.3 per 100 EVs, followed by Greenwich (31.2) and Richmond upon Thames (28.1).
On the other hand, most of the London boroughs with the least chargers were located in Outer London, with Harrow having the least per EV, with just 14 public chargers, which works out as 1.7 per 100 EVs. This was followed by Havering (2.1) and Barnet (3.2).
Rank |
Borough |
Number of electric vehicles |
Total |
Total |
Charging |
Rapid Devices |
---|
Number of charging points refers to publically available charging devices in each authority, taken from the Department for Transport’s Electric Vehicle Charging Device Statistics (October 2019) which is sourced from the electrical vehicle charging point platform Zap-Map.
‘Rapid devices’ refers to those whose fastest connector is rated at 43kW or above. Where a device has more than one speed of connector, it is classified as the highest speed available.
Number of registered plug-in vehicles taken from the Department for Transport - Table VEH0131.
Note that we chose to omit authorities with very low populations such as the City of London and Orkney.