Cities fail to use £250m fund to install public EV charge points

Metro Mayors in nine major UK cities have failed to spend a £250m investment fund to install public electric vehicle (EV) chargers.

The UK has nine directly elected Metro Mayors, each of whom is responsible for overseeing the development and maintenance of public services, infrastructure, and transport in their City Region.

This includes supporting the UK’s electrification strategy, which calls for 300,000 new EV charge points to be installed in the next eight years.

Only four of the nine combined authorities installed new charge points last year, and just two installed any for public use.

Jon Lawes, managing director of Novuna Vehicle Solutions, said: “The Metro Mayor position was created with a clear mandate to boost the economic development of the UK’s biggest city regions, and investment in infrastructure is a vital piece of that puzzle.

"Without a critical mass of publicly available EV charge points, the UK will remain shackled to petrol and diesel well beyond our collective 2030 goal.

“We need to pivot from planning mode and start putting shovels in the ground.

The money is available, what’s required now is the political muscle to deliver critical infrastructure, especially for the 40% of households that can’t install a private charger.

"With a quarter of all new sales now being battery powered, the last thing we want is this exponential growth in drivers making the transition to EV’s to be compromised because our local authorities have taken their eye off the ball.”

DfT charge point data

Since July 1, 2021, Department for Transport (DfT) data shows the number of public devices across the UK has increased by 31%, corresponding to 7,637 devices.

The number of rapid devices increased by 31%, with an additional 1,423 public devices. Zap-Map claims the number of ultra-rapid charge points has grown by almost 40% since the end of 2021, meanwhile.

DfT said there is an "uneven geographical distribution of charging devices within the UK".

It confimed some UK local authorities have bid for UK Government funding for charging devices, and others have not, adding most of the provision of this infrastructure has been market-led, with individual charging networks and other businesses choosing where to install devices.

Which regions failed to access charge point funding?  

Novuna revealed, in March, that the funding for Metro Mayors was not being utilised and has since submitted freedom of information (FOI) requests to the offices the UK’s nine Metro Mayors in April 2022, requesting details of how many public and private charge points each had installed in 2021, and how many were funded by the capital investment fund.

The responses reveal that a total of 98 charge points were installed by four authorities last year, of which only 42 were explicitly made available for public use.

Each Mayor has access to a relative share of a £7.45bn capital investment fund over a 30 year period, equating to £250m for each calendar year.

These budgets are in addition to a £6.8bn City Region Sustainable Transport Settlement, which allows the Metro Mayors (with the exception of North of Tyne) to bid to fund initiatives that work towards decarbonising transport, in line with national priorities.

Despite the sizable funding on the table, only the West of England (29) and Greater Manchester (13) installed public chargers in their regions last year. The former also installed 14 charge points restricted for taxis, buses or fleets, joined by Liverpool (13) and West Yorkshire (29).

Tees Valley, The West Midlands, and the Combined Authority of Cambridgeshire and Peterborough disclosed that they hadn’t installed any charge points in 2021, while North of Tyne, and Sheffield/South Yorkshire failed to provide the requested information within the FOI timeframe.

Furthermore, scrutiny of the official Statement of Accounts of the Metro Mayors and their Combined Authorities, as well as the FOI requests, revealed that none of the 98 chargers installed across the regions used the significant capital investment fund, despite it being in place for several years.

With one exception, Dan Norris, Metro Mayor of West of England explained that his office is currently developing a £5m package of EV investment proposals using the West of England Investment Fund, with delivery expected by 2023.

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