2030 EV charger target at risk of 20 year delay

The government will miss its 2030 electric vehicle (EV) public charging point installation target by a “staggering” 20 years if rollout of the devices continues at its current rate, Labour has warned.

The government target in its EV strategy, published nearly a year ago, is for there to be 300,000 public charging points by 2030.

According to figures published in January, 37,000 public EV chargers have been installed so far, including 8,800 last year.

In a debate on the cost and availability of EV infrastructure, held in Parliament’s Westminster Hall last week, shadow transport minister Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi said these figures showed that public charging point installation rates last year were “just a quarter” of the 37,000 required per annum to meet the government’s 2030 target.

“At the current pace, ministers will miss their own target by a staggering 20 years,” he said, adding that there are now 30 EVs per charging device, compared with 16 at the start of 2020.

And the availability of public charging points is “highly concentrated” in London, “at the expense of the north and other areas of our country”, Dhesi said: “There are now more public charging devices in (the London borough of) Westminster alone than in 11 of the biggest northern cities combined and this gap is stretching out wider still. Over the last three months, for example, more devices have been installed in Westminster than in any English region outside London.”

Dhesi’s Labour MP colleague Justin Madders said that while Westminster has exceeded its 2025 target for EV charger rollout by 358%, authorities in his western Cheshire constituency had only hit 28%.

“That is not a good record for a government that stood on a platform of levelling up,” he added.

Conservative MP Steve Brine, who sponsored the debate, said that while last year’s 8,800 installations represented a 31% year-on-year increase it is “clearly not at the rate we need to meet the 2030 target”.

He added that rollout of the infrastructure is “lagging a little behind schedule” and “still off the pace”.

Huw Merriman, minister of state at the Department for Transport, responded that the UK is on track to meet the 300,000-charger target by the end of 2030, pointing out that the total has tripled over the last four years.