There were around 118,000 public chargers across the UK at the end of February 2026, against the government's working estimate that the country will need something closer to 300,000 by 2030 - a pace that means putting in roughly 48,000 new public chargers every year. But the number of chargers was never really the interesting question. The one that matters is whether they get built where people actually need them, because commercial viability and community need are rarely the same map. The sites that pay back fastest for an operator tend not to be the residential streets, estates and town edges where the one in three households with no off-street parking depend entirely on public charging.
Left to itself, that's exactly where a supplier-led procurement will steer. Operators bid for the fastest-payback locations, and LEVI concession contracts are, by design, weighted towards the supplier - so the network that emerges is shaped by commercial gravity rather than by need, with the profitable core served well and the harder-to-reach edges left thin or missed. None of that is bad faith; it's simply the rational response to how the market is built. But it's precisely why a council can't assume the market will deliver fairness on its own.
Underneath all of it sits the grid, and a second, quieter trap. Network capacity data is often impossible to get hold of at business-case stage. DNOs are slow to respond, and councils can't always extract the figures inside the timeframe. The answer isn't to stall, but to make a transparent assumption, provision a sensible contingency, and sense-check it before going anywhere near procurement. Done properly, that falls into two clean stages: first an indicative desktop view of grid capacity, enough to validate the business case and confirm it's worth taking to market, and then the market itself supplying the definitive, site-by-site answer through procurement, where operators carry the DNO relationships and the connection risk. The mistake is skipping that first stage and going to market on a business case no one has tested.
Get either question wrong and the fallback becomes the main event: stranded sites, capital handed back, targets slipping and with the residents who most need public charging waiting while the commercially attractive sites fill up first.
This is the side of the table TVI works from. We help councils package the full picture of need rather than just the sites that pay, and we sense-check the business case with an indicative capacity view so they go to market on something they can trust. Then we run a structured pre-market engagement exercise – aided by a market-sifting tool we're actively developing – to narrow the field to the few operators genuinely willing to take on the whole footprint, cross-subsidising the quieter sites from the busy ones instead of cherry-picking the best and walking away from the rest.
If you're shaping an EV charging programme, or you're worried a supplier-led route will serve the profitable sites and miss the need, it's worth making sure you've packaged the whole picture before you go to market - and that's a conversation we're always happy to have.
