UK council charging presence masks on-street gap

Vauxhall says half of councils still report no on-street charging at all. The figures show why the presence of public charging in a council area is not the same thing as practical near-home charging for residents without driveways.

Public charging presence can hide the residential gap

A local authority can contain rapid hubs, supermarket chargers, destination charging or privately operated public sites and therefore register as having public charging. That does not establish that residents can charge near their homes overnight or within walking distance of where they park.

The Vauxhall data says 39% of councils now have on-street charging, up from 31% in 2023, while 50% still have none. Those percentages should not be treated as a complete two-way split because the research can include authorities whose position is not captured by either headline group.

Council capability is improving, but provision remains uneven

Vauxhall says 32% of councils now have a published strategy for on-street residential charging and 46% employ a dedicated EV charging policy officer. More than 13,000 streets have also been registered as needing charging through the company’s Electric Streets initiative.

The same release says more than 70% of UK on-street charge points installed by the end of 2025 were in London. That concentration means national totals can overstate the level of provision available in many towns and regions outside the capital.

The useful metric is access, not simply presence

For residential charging policy, a more meaningful question is not whether a council area contains a public charger, but what proportion of households without private parking have a dependable charging option close to where they normally leave the vehicle.

As LEVI programmes move from procurement into delivery, useful measures will include on-street sockets per street or household without off-street parking, walking distance to charging, utilisation, reliability and geographic spread. A single public-charging presence metric cannot answer those questions.