On-street charging ‘ahead of demand’ but 12,500 streets demand action

Provision of on-street EV charging in residential areas is running ahead of demand, according to new research by Vauxhall and traffic experts Cenex.

The partners found that “near-home” charging and en-route locations were both further ahead of demand than they were a year ago, but have also warned that the UK still needs another 110,000 chargers in the next five years to keep pace with demand.

The latest data collected by Cenex shows that 22.9% of UK households are now within a four-minute walk of a charger, up from 19.6% in 2024. That is equivalent to an extra 300,000 households being within easy reach of a charger and, according to Vauxhall and Cenex, puts supply a year and a half ahead of demand.

The report also found that more councils are now taking the need for charger provision seriously. The proportion of authorities with a dedicated EV infrastructure policy officer has risen from less than a third in 2023 (31%) to half (51%) in 2025.

According to the report, 29 local authorities in Great Britain already have enough chargers to meet the anticipated demand in 2030, but this represents just 8% of all required coverage. It also found that there had been significant improvement in some individual council areas, with up to 39% more coverage than a year ago.

However, the report also found that provision was still too focused in London and other local authorities were still lagging behind. It revealed that 243 councils across Great Britain have low coverage of accessible chargers compared to the number of EVs in the area, with rural areas particularly poorly served.

The research also suggested that the rate of installation has not kept up in the past year. Only two-thirds of the required additional infrastructure needed to keep up with electric vehicles was deployed in the past 12 months. It estimates that around 110,000 more near home chargepoints are needed in the right places to meet the projected electric vehicle demand by 2030.

However, there is hope of a surge in installations in the coming years as government funding begins to reach local authorities. England’s LEVI Fund and Scotland’s Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Fund (EVIF) estimate that at least 106,000 chargers will be deployed between them in residential areas.

The report is part of Vauxhall’s on-going Electric Streets of Britain campaign, which asks drivers to identify the streets where EV chargers are most needed. So far, drivers have registered more than 12,500 streets around Britain where residential charging is needed.

Steve Catlin, managing director of Vauxhall said: “The country has made great strides in growing its electric vehicle infrastructure since Electric Streets of Britain launched in 2023. Not only have we seen a huge rise in the number of public chargers, but more importantly their installation is increasingly being deployed tactically for drivers who need them on a local level.

“While the ongoing rise in councils who have policy officers dedicated to overseeing charging is encouraging, the 12,500 registrations we have received to Electric Streets shows there is no silver bullet to provide a quick fix for drivers. We need to make sure all parties are pulling in the same direction to maintain the momentum we have seen over the past two years.”

Robert Evans, CEO, Cenex added: “It has been a year since we collaborated with Vauxhall to put forward better metrics to measure the delivery of public EV infrastructure. Using these more relevant, actionable, scalable and measurable metrics, it is great to see the progress made in the last 12 months and assess at a granular level whether current public and private plans are helping meet the needs of residents and drivers.”