The roll out of EV charging infrastructure may be accelerating but the industry now needs to be having important conversations around inclusion, especially for more vulnerable and disabled drivers. Questions remain, too, around how to resolve charging ‘deserts’ and resourcing constraints.
The roll out of electric vehicle (EV) charging infrastructure accelerates, the lighting industry is facing a number of profound – and challenging – questions.
Not the least of these is how to balance accessibility and inclusion, especially for more vulnerable drivers, with commercial viability and electrical safety.
For disabled drivers especially, access to EV charge-points is potentially a real flash-point, as recent research by disabled vehicle operator Motability Operations has illustrated.
In a survey of some 1,500 Motability users and 2,200 regular drivers, it found confidence in the UK’s EV charging network is particularly low, with 37% saying they would not consider using the public charging network at all.
Key concerns are being unable to access a charge-point at or outside their home, with just 12% of disabled drivers (and 28% of the wider UK public) saying they felt there were enough public chargers near where they lived to easily find one when needed.
Even among EV drivers, who perhaps unsurprisingly typically feel more positive about charging networks, only half (51%) believed there were enough public chargers across the country, falling to just 24% among disabled EV drivers.
This, argued Motability Solutions, showed ‘a clear disconnect between the UK’s infrastructure rollout and the real-world needs of drivers with additional mobility requirements’.
CHARGING ‘DESERTS’
There are potentially two issues here, agree Perry Hazell, business manager at London Borough of Southwark, and Rob Baines, electrical assets commissioner at Derbyshire County Council and Chair of the ILP’s Local Authority Lighting Committee.
The first is the fact that, outside London (and especially in more rural areas of the country), there remain significant EV charging ‘deserts’, with patchy access disadvantaging disabled and more vulnerable drivers especially.
As a recent analysis by EV firm Dick Lovett concluded, while in some towns and cities public charging has grown quickly and finding a device is therefore often relatively easy, in others, the network has barely changed, even though more people are buying EVs every year.
This is creating pockets of the country where electric driving is still far more difficult than it should be.
While some local authority areas – North West Leicestershire, Birmingham, and Blaby, for example – are powering ahead in terms of rolling out charging infrastructure, in others – notably Torridge in north Devon, Havant and Bristol, among others – progress is much slower, it concluded.
A further issue here, highlights Rob, is the variability of the street infrastructure itself outside more homogenised urban centres. ‘In Derbyshire, for example, especially in some of the old mining and mill towns, the roads are very narrow; there’s only really parking available on one side of the road.
‘So it’s often a question of “you guys on that side of the street can have a cross-pavement solution but sorry, people on the other, you’re going to have to charge at one of the commercial rapid charges and pay possibly up to 10 times per kilowatt hour”,’ he says.
COMMERCIAL VIABILITY QUESTIONS
The second issue, as Perry emphasises, is that it is often much harder for commercial charge-point operators (CPOs) to make the numbers stack up when considering provision for disabled drivers.
Southwark’s EV policy is prioritising disabled users and will continue to do so, he emphasises. ‘We’ve been speaking to Motability Operations. They have, I think, around 120 customers in Southwark, of whom about 80 are now in EVs, with others looking to transition,’ Perry tells Lighting Journal.
‘But there is also a socioeconomic element to this. Disabled drivers are often in low-income households and are normally lower mileage users. So, when you’re talking about commercial viability in regard to a charge-point they’re not the sort of customer that, generally, a CPO would prioritise.
Because if you install, say, a £3,000 charge-point, you are unlikely to recover that investment quickly. These drivers also normally have a dedicated disabled bay outside their home.
‘We think that’s absolutely perfect for a cross-payment solution, albeit the products are not fully PAS-compliant at the moment. More widely, however, this whole conversation does raise important questions about equity of access on the highway, conversations that we do need to be having as an industry,’ Perry adds.
Perry and Rob’s reference to cross-pavement solutions emphasises a further important ongoing discussion around EV charging: the industry’s electrical safety concerns around residential cross-pavement charging.
This, of course, was highlighted in Lighting Journal both last year and in the spring (‘It is a wild west out there’, September 2025, vol 90, no 8; ‘Back to earth’, March 2026, vol 91, no 3).
Cross-pavement solutions are growing in popularity, with the government last autumn promising to ‘slash red tape’ to enable greater access to such home-charging solutions.
In fact, a recent Freedom of Information request by car company Vauxhall found that 42% of councils in England, Scotland and Wales plan to have cross-pavement charging available by the end of 2026.
This is despite the fact the roll out of cross-pavement charging has also been branded as something of a ‘postcode lottery’, with The Guardian newspaper reporting local authorities often taking very different approaches, and with appetite for investment varying widely.
This is an area where Rob is working to carry out research into what, exactly, are the touch-potential risks here (‘This is something we want to get traction on’, March 2026, vol 91, no 3).
As he says to Lighting Journal: ‘I’ve got a decent working group together, but I am still keen to hear from members on this, on their views or thoughts, experiences or reflections.
‘I’m deliberately trying to keep it non-commercial so it carries more rigour whenever the time comes that anything gets published. If it’s dangerous, I’m going to come out and say, “look, we’ve done this research, it’s dangerous”,’ he explains.
RESOURCING CHALLENGES
More widely, the ramping up of the UK’s charging infrastructure – domestic, on-street, cross-pavement or commercial – while of course important in terms of the country’s net zero aspirations, is creating capacity and resourcing challenges for local authorities.
As Perry explains: ‘I think what a lot of people aren’t realising at the moment is the hidden costs of EV charging infrastructure. Yes, there are loads of government grants, so the upfront capital cost of a cross-pavement solution, for example, is covered.
‘But we’re now trying to understand what the actual cost of managing this is as an asset. And to be honest we just don’t know. For example, if it needs a six-monthly RCD test, who’s doing that? How are we evidencing that back to the local authority? How are we checking it? Who needs to check it? How are they qualified? ‘We also have six-monthly highway inspections. So, you put something like this in and there are slips, trips and falls, who’s checking that? We then we need to speak to the highways’ inspectors. That’s additional, too, for local authorities. It’s a real capacity and resourcing issue.
‘At the moment it is relatively small numbers and so we can cover it. But if we’re not building in those costs now, and considering what the future may look like, we’re ultimately going to fail. It looks like a good and viable solution, but is it?
‘Then there are questions such as whether you introduce a licence attachment fee now. So, we’re thinking an annual fee, like a Section 178-type agreement. We could do that and then that person would be licensed. We could do an annual fee, we could check every three years, it could be reapplied, checked, and so on,’ Perry adds.
UNDERSTANDING DRIVER BEHAVIOUR
Finally, local authorities could benefit from having a clearer picture of how investment in the different charging infrastructure options actually changes EV driver behaviour, Perry highlights. He points to recent research carried out in Brighton around on-column charge-points.
‘They had found that, before installation, the rapid chargers in that area were being used quite consistently because people wanted certainty, they wanted to know they could charge and then get on with their journey,’ Perry says.
‘However, once people had a dedicated bay for EV charging, the use of the on-street standard AC charging doubled and the use of the rapid chargers halved. Just by changing the dedication of the bay to EV users only. ‘What this means for local authorities thinking about the right EV solution for them, is that, actually, you’ve got to think differently. It’s not necessarily about installing more infrastructure, it may be about making existing infrastructure more accessible or working to change driver behaviour. So, if we dedicate all of our bays, we might get fewer people wanting to use cross-pavement solutions or rapid chargers,’ Perry points out.
‘We don’t really know what drivers’ behaviours are going to be like or how they’re going to change. This means, as a local authority we have to be agile in how we deliver that charging infrastructure, how we deliver and scope out our four- or five-year investment plans,’ he adds
This is an abridged version of the article that appears in the September edition of Lighting Journal. To read the full article, simply click on the page-turner to your right.
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