Funding doubled to £10m for car charger installation in 2021

Funding for new electric vehicle chargepoints on residential roads has doubled to £10m for 2021.

The increase, announced today (21 January) by transport secretary Grant Shapps, could fund the installation of 3,600 chargepoints around the country. The government hopes to make charging at home and overnight easier for drivers without off-street parking.

The announcement also included plans to make chargepoint locations and power ratings openly available in a standard format for the first time. The Department for Transport will look at how real-time information could be published, showing whether chargers are in working order and currently in use. Developers could then use that information, incorporating it into sat navs and map applications.

“We want to make electric cars the new normal, and ensuring drivers have convenient places to charge is key to that,” said Shapps.

There are currently over 24,000 publicly-available chargers, of which over 2,400 are rapid chargepoints – usually rated at 43kW or 50kW, according to charge-mapper website Zap-Map. A number of companies operate their own networks around the UK.

The government said it has ‘challenged’ industry to provide debit and credit card payment at all newly-installed rapid chargepoints and develop a roaming solution across the charging network, allowing electric vehicle drivers to use any public chargepoint through a single app or payment method.

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