The UK's EV charging infrastructure is growing rapidly, but it is growing in the wrong places. Public chargers are concentrated in London and the South East, in affluent urban postcodes, and alongside major retail and motorway corridors. Meanwhile, 9.3 million households that rely on street parking lack a public charger within a five-minute walk. Only 15% of public charge points in England are located in rural areas.
This paper raises the question that site acquisition strategies currently deployed by charge point operators may be replicating the mistakes of the early broadband rollout — prioritising commercially attractive locations and leaving the hardest-to-serve communities to a later phase that, without structural intervention, may never fully arrive. Drawing on the lessons of the broadband universal service obligation, the Rural Gigabit Connectivity programme, and the Shared Rural Network, it sets out a framework for an equitable, nationally coordinated approach to EV charging land acquisition.
The Inequality in Plain Sight
The aggregate statistics on UK EV charging tell a story of impressive progress. According to Zapmap, as of June 2026 there are now 121,171 public EV chargers across the UK, sited on 94,595 devices at 46,731 locations. Of those, 28,089 are rapid or ultra-rapid. These are genuine achievements. But aggregate statistics mask a distribution problem that, if unaddressed, will determine whether the electric vehicle transition is a shared national achievement or a privilege for those who happen to live in the right postcode.
The geography of access
Greater London alone accounts for 31,094 of the UK's 121,171 public chargers — roughly 26% of the entire national network — and the South East adds a further 15,555. Together, London and the South East hold nearly 39% of all public chargers. By contrast, the North East has just 907 rapid and ultra-rapid chargers, and Northern Ireland just 355. Somerset, Westmorland and Furness, Herefordshire, the Isle of Wight, and numerous other rural and coastal authorities are among the worst-ranked areas in the country; places where EV ownership rates remain as low as 2%.
The five-minute test
Analysis by Field Dynamics found that approximately three-quarters of households relying on street parking do not have a public charger within a five-minute walk. In North-East Derbyshire and Redditch, fewer than 4% of on-street households have adequate coverage. In Westminster and Kensington and Chelsea, coverage approaches 100%. This is not a market outcome. It is a market failure.
The rural picture is starker still. Only 15% of public charge points in England are in rural areas — approximately one every ten miles, compared to one every 0.75 miles in London. Ultra-rapid chargers (150kW+) grew at 40% year-on-year in 2025, adding 3,425 units, almost exclusively in high-utilisation commercial locations. Of the 68,000 potential sites identified for charge-point installation across Great Britain, fewer than 1% are currently operational. And 79% of those untapped sites are in rural or semi-rural areas.
Why this matters beyond fairness
The equity argument is compelling in its own right. But there are also hard commercial and policy reasons why the current distribution pattern is unsustainable. The government's 8 million EV target by 2030 cannot be achieved if large segments of the population are effectively locked out of practical EV ownership. EV adoption in rural areas — where average annual mileage is higher and running cost savings are larger — represents a disproportionate share of the potential emissions reduction from road transport. And the EV transition's political legitimacy depends on it being seen as equitable.
How We Got Here: The Commercial Logic Trap
The current distribution of EV charging infrastructure is not the result of malice or indifference. It is the predictable outcome of leaving infrastructure deployment entirely to private capital following commercial return. CPOs and site acquirers, operating rationally within the incentive structures available to them, have prioritised locations that offer the highest utilisation rates, the simplest grid connections, and the greatest certainty of return.
The rational operator problem
A charge point operator assessing two potential sites faces an asymmetric calculation. Site A is a motorway service area on the M6: high footfall, existing grid infrastructure, a national landowner with a professional property team, and a clear commercial framework. Site B is a village car park in rural Cumbria: low average daily traffic, costly grid connection requiring a new substation, a parish council landlord with no prior experience of leasehold infrastructure agreements, and uncertain utilisation in the near term.
The commercial case for Site A is straightforward. The case for Site B requires either subsidy, a longer investment horizon, or a non-commercial mandate. Without one of those three things, Site B does not get built. And this dynamic, replicated across thousands of micro-decisions by dozens of CPOs over five years, has produced the distribution we see today.
"The market will eventually reach rural communities; but 'eventually' is not an energy policy. The broadband rollout taught us that without structural intervention, the commercial case for hard-to-reach communities never quite materialises. We are repeating that lesson in real time."
The land acquisition bottleneck
Even where CPOs are willing to invest in less commercially obvious locations, the land acquisition process presents a structural barrier. The professional landlord community understands the EV charging leasehold model and can engage with it efficiently. Parish councils, community organisations, NHS trusts, faith groups, rural estate owners, and small local authorities frequently do not. The result is a skills and capacity gap that slows deals in underserved areas to a fraction of the pace achievable in prime urban and retail locations.
The Broadband Parallel: Lessons from a Completed Journey
The most instructive precedent for the EV charging equity challenge is the UK's broadband rollout. Not because the technologies are identical, but because the structural problem — a commercially attractive market delivering uneven geographic outcomes with rural and hard-to-reach communities left behind — and the eventual policy response are directly applicable.
| Factor | Broadband | EV Charging |
|---|---|---|
| Market phase | Post-privatisation, pre-USO | Post-ZEV mandate, pre-equity mandate |
| Private sector bias | Urban/suburban, profitable exchanges | Urban/retail, high-utilisation sites |
| Left-behind areas | Rural, remote, lower-density | Rural, deprived urban, on-street |
| Policy mechanism | USO + Rural Gigabit Connectivity fund | LEVI + Rural Connectivity Fund (nascent) |
| Land/access challenge | Private wayleaves, last-mile cost | Grid connection cost, landowner capacity |
| Community solution | Community Fibre Partnerships | Community EV hubs (emerging) |
Four lessons from the broadband rollout
Lesson 1: The market will serve most people, but not everyone. BT's commercial fibre rollout reached approximately 90% of the UK relatively efficiently. The last 10% required direct public intervention. The same pattern is emerging in EV charging: the commercially attractive 70–80% of locations will be served adequately by the private market. The remaining 20 to 30% will not.
Lesson 2: Outside-in planning must be built in from the start. The most effective phases of the broadband rollout deliberately started with the hardest-to-reach communities and built inward. When this discipline was abandoned, the PAC and EFRA committees found the government was unable to demonstrate it was still following its outside-in approach — resulting in a perpetuation of digital inequality. EV charging policy is currently running inside-out.
Lesson 3: Community intermediaries are essential. The Community Fibre Partnerships model — through which local organisations could apply for match-funded vouchers — proved to be one of the most effective mechanisms for reaching communities that commercial operators would not serve. An equivalent model for EV charging is beginning to emerge, but at nowhere near the required scale.
Lesson 4: Voucher and subsidy schemes work, but need demand stimulation. The Gigabit Broadband Voucher Scheme demonstrated that demand-side subsidies can accelerate uptake in underserved areas. The EV charging equivalent — the Rural EV Charging Fund and the LEVI scheme — is an important start, but the quantum of funding (£7 million and £2.2 million respectively) is orders of magnitude below what the broadband rollout required for equivalent geographic coverage.
A Framework for Equitable Land Acquisition
The solution to the EV charging equity problem is not to override the market — it is to complement it with a structured, publicly coordinated land acquisition framework that systematically identifies, develops, and delivers sites in underserved areas.
Principle 1: Treat charging access as a utility right
The fundamental reframing required is to treat access to EV charging — within a reasonable distance and at a reasonable cost — as a right comparable to access to broadband or mains electricity. A Charge Access Obligation, modelled on Ofcom's broadband USO, could define that every UK resident should have access to a public charge point capable of delivering at least 50kW within a 20-minute drive.
Principle 2: Build a national site identification database
An equivalent national EV charging site identification database — mapping grid headroom, planning constraints, land ownership and potential utilisation at a postcode level — would transform the ability of CPOs, local authorities, and community groups to identify and prioritise acquisition targets in underserved areas. The data exists in fragmented form across DNOs, Ordnance Survey, Land Registry, DfT, and local authority records.
Underserved site types
- Parish and village car parks
- Community centres and village halls
- Rural pubs and hospitality venues
- NHS primary care and community health sites
- Rural train stations and bus interchanges
- Farm shops and rural attractions
- Places of worship with car parks
- Social housing estates
Land acquisition enablers needed
- Standardised community lease templates
- DNO rural grid connection subsidy
- Capacity-building support for parish councils
- Match-funded community hub vouchers
- Pre-approved planning frameworks
- Long-term revenue sharing with host communities
- Mobile/off-grid BESS hybrid charging units
- Anchor tenant model (NHS, local authority)
Principle 3: Create standardised community lease structures
A library of standardised community EV charging lease templates — developed by central government in partnership with CPOs, local authority associations, and community sector bodies — would dramatically reduce the transaction cost of rural and community site acquisition. This is precisely what the Broadband Delivery UK programme did for telecoms wayleave agreements.
Principle 4: Use anchor tenants to de-risk rural deployment
In the broadband rollout, public sector anchor tenants — schools, GP surgeries, libraries, and council offices — played a critical role in making rural infrastructure economically viable. An NHS primary care centre, a rural secondary school, or a local authority leisure facility with an EV charger provides a guaranteed demand anchor that can make the economics of a rural hub work.
Principle 5: Mobile and off-grid charging as a bridging solution
Not every rural community needs a permanent, grid-connected charging hub in the near term. For remote and island communities where grid connection costs are prohibitive, mobile charging units and BESS-backed off-grid hubs offer a practical bridging solution. Co-locating BESS with rural charging hubs solves two problems simultaneously: it eliminates or reduces the need for costly grid reinforcement, and it creates a local energy storage asset that can provide additional grid services revenue.
The Role of Commercial CPOs: Obligation and Opportunity
The argument for equitable EV charging does not require commercial operators to abandon financial discipline. It requires them to recognise that the long-term commercial opportunity in underserved markets is larger than their current site acquisition strategies suggest.
Zapmap data identifies over 68,000 potential charge-point sites across Great Britain — 79% in rural or semi-rural areas, with fewer than 1% currently operational. This is not a market that has been assessed and found wanting. It is a market that has not been seriously assessed at all, because the commercial frameworks, site development tools, and grid connection strategies that would make it viable have not been developed.
The rural tourism economy alone generates £1.4 billion per year in Scotland. European data from community charging deployments shows that retail spending in communities with public charging infrastructure increases by 12–18%, and that property values within half a mile of charging hubs rise by 3–5%.
"The business case for rural EV charging is not absent — it is immature. The operators who invest now in developing the land acquisition tools, grid strategies, and community partnerships for underserved markets will find themselves with a structural advantage as policy and consumer demand inevitably force the network to expand beyond its current boundaries."
Policy Recommendations
The following recommendations are directed at government, network operators, and local authorities, designed to be implemented in parallel rather than in sequence.
For government
For charge point operators
For local authorities and communities
Conclusion
The broadband rollout left a generation of rural and deprived communities behind — not through deliberate exclusion, but through the natural logic of a market allowed to optimise for commercially attractive locations first. The digital divide that resulted took over a decade and billions of pounds of public investment to close, and in some of the most remote communities, it has not closed yet. We are at risk of repeating that outcome in the EV charging transition.
The good news is that we are not yet a decade into the EV charging rollout. The network has grown to 121,171 public chargers (as of June 2026) — a real achievement. But the coverage gap is visible, measurable, and with appropriate policy intervention, addressable. The tools exist. The precedent exists. The commercial opportunity exists in 68,000 unserved sites, 79% of which are in the rural and semi-rural communities most in need.
What is required is the political and commercial will to treat EV charging infrastructure as a public utility — as essential to the functioning of modern life as running water, mains electricity, or a broadband connection — applying the same level of strategic coordination, public investment, and equity obligation that we eventually, if belatedly, applied to those.
The EV transition can be something the whole country goes on together. But only if the people responsible for building the network deliberately choose to make it so.