Standing at the despatch box, Rishi Sunak vowed to make Britain a world leader “in the industries and technologies of the future”. It was the eve of the Covid-19 pandemic, a different era of politics, and Boris Johnson’s chancellor was outlining a series of taxpayer-backed bets on technologies such as space and nuclear fusion.
Alongside those futuristic industries, Sunak vowed a major taxpayer-backed investment in electric vehicle charging, another priority of Johnson’s government.
The Rapid Charging Fund, a £950m project to line Britain’s motorways with superfast chargers, would help drive Britain into the electric car era, subsidising the installation of stations and giving motorists the confidence to make the switch to EVs.
Support for electric cars was in the ascendancy. A few months later, the Conservative government moved the petrol car ban forward from 2040 to 2030, as part of plans for a “green economic recovery” from Covid-19.
But almost five years after the Rapid Charging Fund was announced, not a penny of the £950m fund has been deployed and not a single charger has been built with its backing. The support fund, once trumpeted as a pillar of Britain’s electrification, remains in limbo after a series of reviews and consultations.
Five years on from then chancellor Rishi Sunak’s promise to boost Britain’s electric car infrastructure, the Rapid Charging Fund has achieved nothing
ChargeUK, the industry lobby group, said in recent evidence to Parliament that silence on the fund’s future created “unhelpful uncertainty”. Energy UK said hold-ups were “delaying the deployment of rapid charging infrastructure, which is critical for supporting the transition to electric vehicles”.
“This fund was launched with great fanfare by Sunak and the Conservatives. And the fact that not sixpence has been spent is, is indicative of the fact that this Government and the last government, they just don’t do electric cars,” said Quentin Willson, the former Top Gear host turned EV campaigner.
After Sunak unveiled the fund in 2020, the Department for Transport (DfT) spun up “Project Rapid”. It set a target to instal 2,500 “ultra rapid” chargers – those that can charge a car from 20pc to 80pc in 30 minutes – by 2030 and 6,000 by 2035.
More immediately, it would ensure there were at least six ultra rapid chargers at every motorway service station by the end of 2023. The fund would start allocating money in 2022 before a full rollout a year later. Rather than directly paying for chargers, it would fund electricity network upgrades around the stations so that they could cope with demand.
But it emerged that officials at the DfT were unsure about how to spend the cash. Plans to launch a series of “pathfinder” projects were delayed, in part due to a rotation of new prime ministers and questions over net zero policies.
Ten sites were proposed for a £70m trial of the scheme but an investigation by the Competition and Markets Authority raised concerns that it could distort competition between service station operators, potentially opening the government up to legal challenges.
The pilot was finally announced in late 2023 but required consultation. By then, Sunak had pushed the petrol ban back to 2035, which EV supporters say knocked confidence.
Updates on the fund have been non-existent since the election, despite Labour pledging in 2023 that it would “release funding as soon as possible” if it came to power. The party said: “We recognise the frustration from industry about how the government has administered charge point funding.”
Roadchef, which operates 21 motorway service stations in Britain, recently told the public accounts committee that applying for the scheme had been “onerous” and complained that “unreasonable commercial conditions were imposed”. Macquarie, the Australian bank that owns Roadchef, called the scheme ineffective.
Many charge point operators have found that bureaucracy and slow grid connections, rather than a lack of cash, have been the main obstacles to installations, and the fact that service station operators have no experience applying for grid upgrades.
Five years after the scheme was announced, the market has developed without the fund, but not necessarily in the way its architects would have liked.
Britain is on track to significantly beat the goal of 2,500 ultra rapid chargers by 2030, with 2,377 already installed as of last summer. However, these have been disproportionately located in one region.
Last year, the National Audit Office (NAO) found that 44pc of all public charge points were based in London and the South East, with only 15pc in rural areas. The capital has 234 charge points per 100,000 residents, more than four times the density of Yorkshire and the Humber.
While the fund had aimed for all motorway services to have at least six ultra rapid chargers by the end of 2023, only 62pc did last summer. The NAO found that there were large stretches of road where drivers risked running out of battery. Because range anxiety is a common obstacle to EV demand, these “charging deserts” risk putting drivers off making the switch to electric.
The NAO said that while Britain was likely to hit a target of 300,000 nationwide chargers by 2030, “[this] does not consider their locations, which so far are largely in the South and in urban areas”.
Despite progress, the office warned that only 10pc of motorway service stations had the power needed to match expected demand in 2035. In many places, installing chargers was “commercially unviable without government intervention”, the report warned.
Jo Shanmugalingam, the DfT’s permanent secretary, recently told MPs that “this is something where there has been more complexity”, while director of transport decarbonisation Richard Bruce said that changes to how the grid was upgraded mean the fund’s original design would have to be scrapped.
“It is a very different landscape, which is why the original conception of how it is going to work is probably not how it is going to work in the future,” he said.
In other words, EV drivers face yet more waiting before they see the fruits of the Rapid Charging Fund.
A DfT spokesman said: “We’re making great progress in rolling out the EV charging infrastructure, with a record of nearly 20,000 public charge points added in 2024 alone, and the number of charge points at motorway service areas nearly doubling in the last year according to industry data.”
