Question to the Department for Transport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, what assessment he has made of the implications for his policies of the International Council on Clean Transportation's working paper entitled Quantifying the electric vehicle charging infrastructure gap in the UK.

We welcome the International Council on Clean Transportation's paper on electric vehicle charging infrastructure in the UK and note its recommendations for the UK vehicle charging network out to 2030 and beyond. The UK is a global front-runner in supporting provision of charging infrastructure along with private sector investment. Our vision is to have one of the best infrastructure networks in the world for electric vehicles, and we want chargepoints to be accessible, affordable and secure.

The recently published UK electric vehicle (EV) infrastructure strategy sets out our plans to accelerate the rollout of a world-class charging network and to make EV charging cheaper and more convenient than refuelling at a petrol station. Of the £2.5 billion of Government funding committed to the EV transition since 2020, over £1.6 billion will be used to support charging infrastructure.

We know that the majority of EV drivers charge at home and we expect this trend to continue. However, we must ensure public chargepoints are in place to support those without off-street parking and to enable long distance journeys. We expect at least ten times more public chargepoints to be installed across the UK by the end of the decade, bringing the number to around 300,000 by 2030.