The Charge Your Car network is to introduce a £1 connection fee for charging points that are currently free.
From May 1, Charge Your Car will apply a £1 connection fee to successful charges on all public charge points in England and Wales that do not have a tariff applied to them. Some points, including rapid chargers, currently levy a charge per kWh used, and these are not affected.
The company said in an email to customers: "Due to the rapidly growing industry, we have decided to introduce the connection fee so we can continue to improve the service that our drivers have come to expect from us. The level of activity across CYC operated free to use charge points has increased three-fold over the last year, with our network now connecting over 30,000 EV drivers to charge points, and the fee will ensure we can continue to operate the 24-hour customer telephone line, support the growing demand on the network, and continue to develop and maintain online resources for our customers.
"The connection fee will also recognise that more of the burden of the cost of operating the network is needing to be met by the driver rather than the site owner."
Customers will be invoiced monthly for any charging fees.
The network was originally founded as part of the Plugged In Places scheme in the North East of England, but has expanded to take in regional schemes from elsewhere in England and Wales under one membership programme.
The company was bought by Chargemaster in January 2017.
bob the engineer - 31/03/2017 08:08
I don't have a problem with paying charges, but for smaller battery PHEV's on these slow chargers it would mean a 4/5 hour stay to make use of the £1 on a comparable level to home charging. It would have been better to follow the model used on their rapid chargers of 9p per kw/h. As it is it discriminates against the PHEV owner who doesn't have half a day to kill at the odd locations these slow chargers are. If you get your tariff wrong you end up like the Ecotricity network which now sits largely dormant sadly in the corner of most services.