Question to the Department for Transport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, what assessment he has made of the public availability of electric vehicle charging points.

We recognise that a UK-wide, reliable and joined-up public electric vehicle charging network infrastructure is essential for realising our ambitions for zero emission driving and we will continue to invest to bring this about.

Our jointly funded £400 million Chargepoint Infrastructure Investment Fund’s first investment round, worth a total of £70 million, will ensure the delivery of a further 3,000 rapid charging devices by 2024, more than doubling the current number of rapid charging devices.

On 21 January, we announced that Government has doubled the value of the On-street Residential Charging Scheme for 2020-2021 to £10 million to support the provision of up to 3,600 chargepoints for those that do not have off-street parking.

In July 2019 work commenced to determine a vision for a core rapid charger network on England’s strategic road network. This will report in Spring 2020. Highways England has committed £15m to ensure there are chargepoints (rapid where possible) every 20 miles on 95% of the Strategic Road Network by 2020. As of December 2019 84% of the network is within 20 miles of a rapid electric vehicle chargepoint.

To date, government and industry have supported the installation of over 17,000 devices providing over 24,000 publicly available chargepoints. This includes over 2,400 rapid chargepoints – one of the largest networks in Europe.