The government has pledged to invest £24bn of capital funding to maintain and improve motorways over the next five years, plus committed £400m to support an expansion of EV charging infrastructure, especially on-street charging.
The announcement is part of the government’s new Industrial Strategy published today.
The Department for Business and Trade has also pledged £15.6bn for some of England’s largest city regions to improve transport connectivity via the Transport for City Regions Settlements.
A further £2.3bn of funding has been committed to the Local Transport Grant to improve transport connectivity in smaller cities, towns, and rural areas, and £900m for bus services.
A total of £400m has also been put aside to support the roll out of charging infrastructure across the country, especially electric vehicles.
However, this £400m pledge has come as Labour has also scrapped a £950m EV rapid-charging fund that was originally announced by Conservatives, it has been reported.
According to the Guardian newspaper, £400m will be targeted at on-street charging points instead of motorway-based rapid-charging points.
The rapid charging fund (RCF) was first announced in 2020 by Rishi Sunak, then Conservative chancellor, with the aim of supporting upgrades to the grid so that more electric vehicles could be rapidly charged at the same time.
However, it was mired in delays and concerns it could unfairly benefit some motorway service companies.
Labour ministers have scrapped now decided instead to prioritise investment, albeit a smaller sum, in on-street charging points, the paper said.
The number of electric car chargers in the UK is rising rapidly, passing 80,000 in May, according to the data company Zap Map. That represented a 29% increase compared with a year earlier, while the number of rapid chargers with power above 50kW rose by a third, the paper added.
Increasing the number of public chargers is seen as crucial to persuading people to switch to electric cars.
However, the focus has shifted from rapid chargers, which can allay ‘range anxiety’ on longer journeys, to the slower on-street chargers needed for car owners who do not have private parking spaces, the newspaper argued.
Separately, the Industrial Strategy also outlined an uplift in investment in skills and training, including training the next generation of engineers.
A total of £1.2bn has been set aside as an ‘annual skills investment’, including more money for technical training and apprenticeships.
There will be extra funding for technical excellence colleges, short courses in artificial intelligence and investment in training providers in England, the government said.
A total of £100m over three years was pledged within the strategy for investment in engineering skills, especially to increase the pipeline of talent into clean energy and advanced manufacturing roles.
And £625m was being committed to training ‘thousands’ of new construction workers, it said.
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