Picture the scene. You are part of an increasingly environmentally-friendly police force. You are responding to an emergency call in Havering, driving fast, lights flashing, when you realise that the battery of your electric squad car is about to die. Where can you charge it?
In Havering, the situation is particularly challenging. According to Open Charge Map data there are around 12,000 charging stations in London, of which just 36 are in Havering. Of those, more than half have access to them restricted in some way, including through private membership schemes.
Furthermore, only 16 of the 32 offer fast-charging points (50kW or above) and only seven of those are for public use. The ultra-fast chargers (150kW+) which are preferred by emergency services are even harder to find – there are only three such charging stations in the entire borough offering these highest speeds to everyone.
This problem is not unique to Havering. London’s charging infrastructure varies hugely by borough, but in most places there is simply not the right volume of the right kind of connections to meet the needs of the public or the emergency services.
To address this shortage, the Metropolitan Police have begun to invest in charging infrastructure at its own sites. In 2022, of the 128 Met buildings with parking facilities, about 33 had electric charging stations. This translated to 264 individual charging points across the Met’s estate. But by 2024, the number of points had grown by only 55, to a total of 319. This is equivalent to about 49 electric or hybrid cars per charging station, or five Met cars per charging point.
The issue has become particularly pertinent with the Met’s transition from petrol and diesel to electric. At present, roughly one in three police vehicles are electric or hybrid. So far, much of the infrastructure strain has been mitigated by a reliance on hybrids. Between 2021 and 2023, the Met acquired 437 hybrid cars and only 30 pure-electric cars.
But in less than five years, the Met will not be able to buy new petrol or diesel cars. In 10 years, they won’t even be able to buy hybrids. Instead, they will have to buy exclusively electric when replacing old vehicles. The Met has already taken this into account in terms of the models they plan to buy, with an additional 677 electric vehicles to be bought by 2030. But where will their increasingly electric fleet be charged?
We have been in something of a chicken-and-egg situation when it comes to electric vehicle infrastructure. For policymakers and companies to make the necessary investment, there needs to be a wide usership of electric cars. And for consumers to buy electric, they need to believe there are sufficient chargers for them to avoid running out of power when driving around.
That loop has now been partially broken. Although the Labour government has in recent days partially relaxed electric vehicle sales targets in response to Donald Trump’s tariffs, its ban on selling new petrol and diesel cars will still come into effect in 2030 and its ban on sales of hybrids from 2025 is unchanged, too. Also, many public bodies have their own, separate commitments to Net Zero, such as the Met’s target of having a zero emission fleet by 2050. As a result, the number of EVs on our roads is going to grow. But so far the number of charging stations isn’t keeping up.
Access to charging stations varies hugely across the city. On the whole, outer London has worse coverage, though it is particularly limited in the outer east: Barking & Dagenham, next door to Havering, is the most poorly-served borough of all, with just under 30 charging stations. By contrast, the number of vehicle chargers is highest in inner London. Hammersmith & Fulham has over 1,700 stations and Southwark has around the same number.
Car ownership is lower in the inner boroughs, but electric vehicles (EVs) tend to former a bigger part of the market in those local authority areas, as shown by the map below. Yet at the same time, because overall car ownership rates are higher in outer London boroughs, the total number of EVs there is bigger.
By looking at the number of charging stations per electric car registered in London’s local authorities, we can get a better picture of what provision across the different boroughs is. It turns out that Hillingdon, at the outer edge of west London, has the highest EV to charging station ratio in the city. There are nearly 16,000 electric vehicles registered in the authority, but only 113 charging stations. This equates to 140 EVs for every one of them. Havering has a ratio of 121, while Bromley and Harrow aren’t much better off with 118 EVs for every charging station.
In inner London, the ratios are a lot smaller. In Hammersmith & Fulham there are seven EVs to every charging station, although it is Southwark that has the lowest ratio – its roughly 1,700 stations mean that its 3,391 EV drivers enjoy a ratio of two to one.
It’s also important to note that not all charging stations are created equal. The majority of chargers in the city are either slow or fast – taking anywhere from two to 12 hours to charge a car. Rapid is anything from 50kW up and ultra-rapid is above 150kW. The London-wide distribution of the differently-powered chargers is shown below.
The patchy coverage and slow charging are not going unnoticed. YouGov found that for one quarter of Londoners, the biggest barrier to getting an EV would be their inability to charge it at their home – unsurprising, givnen that 56 per cent of us live in flats. Nearly 40 per cent of Londoners would be put off purchasing an EV because of the lack of public charging infrastructure, making it a bigger concern in the capital than anywhere else in the country. And 16 per cent of us would be put off by slow charge times.
The Mayor’s London electric vehicle infrastructure delivery plan acknowledged that infrastructure limitations are a key concern. But the team behind it also acknowledged obstacles to EV uptake more fundamental than the lack of chargers, including complicated and inconvenient charging systems, higher energy costs and competing pressures on the grid. Getting these basics right is essential to ensuring that the new wave of EVs doesn’t hit a wall.
Footnote: All Open Charge Map data is open source data, not official government body statistics.
Jenevieve Treadwell is a Policy Fellow working on the LSE’s Leading for London programme. Follow her on X/Twitter. OnLondon.co.uk provides unique, no-advertising and no-paywall coverage of the capital’s politics, development and culture. Support the website and its writers for just £5 a month or £50 a year and get things that other people won’t. Details HERE.