The Government has announced a fresh injection of £56m into the Local Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (LEVI) pilot, which it hopes will see a boost in the number of on-street chargepoints accessible to electric drivers with no off-street parking. 

The money will mean a short-term increase in installations, with a further 2,400 publicly accessible charge points set to be installed across the country. 

The LEVI fund builds on the existing On-Street Residential Chargepoint Scheme (ORCS), and exists as a means to upscale the ambition of local authorities when it comes to planning for public charging infrastructure. 

Originally, three local authorities (Durham, Barnet and North Yorkshire) were part of the LEVI scheme, but 16 new pilot areas have been announced across England. These include schemes in Buckinghamshire, Cumbria, Hackney, Harborough, Hounslow, Lancashire, Norfolk, Oxfordshire, Rotherham, Sunderland, Waltham Forest, Warwickshire, West Midlands, West Sussex, West Yorkshire and York.

 £22m of the money is coming from central Government, with a further £17m from private funds and £2m from local authorities. The Government’s most recent figures revealed that as of 1 January 2023, there were 37,055 public electric vehicle chargers installed in the UK, and last year, 8,680 devices were installed. 

London remains the region with the most public charging devices per head, with 131 chargers per 100,000 people. In England, the North West boasts the least, with just 31 charge points per 100,000.

The government has targeted for 300,000 public charge points to be available by 2030