Lamppost and on-street chargers: which councils have them?

The idea is simple. Street lights already have a power supply, so a small charging socket goes into the column or into a bollard next to it, and the council doesn't have to dig up the road. ubitricity, which is Shell's lamppost business, puts the standard output at up to 5kW; char.gy says up to 7.7kW where the supply allows. Neither is fast, and that's fine, because the car is parked for the night anyway. Ten hours at 5kW is 50kWh, which is a full battery for most family EVs and about 150 miles.

Two things catch people out. There's no cable attached, so you need your own Type 2 lead in the boot, and the socket is on a lamppost, so the space next to it isn't yours. Some councils paint an EV bay; most don't. To start, you scan the QR code on the post and pay by card, Apple Pay or Google Pay, or you use an app such as Shell Recharge or Zapmap. There's no membership, no connection fee, and you pay for the kWh you took.

The two networks that matter are ubitricity, with 14,441 chargers across more than 30 local authorities in August 2026, and char.gy with 5,690. Between them that's most of the lamppost charging in Britain, and both are almost entirely in cities and their suburbs.

The Department for Transport counts every public charger by local authority each quarter. The table below is its 1 July 2026 list ranked by chargers per 100,000 people, which is the fair way to compare a borough with a county. It counts every public charger, not just the lamppost ones, because nobody publishes lamppost chargers council by council. But it tells you what you need to know: the top ten are nine London boroughs and Coventry, and the UK average is 175.

The on-street picture is even more lopsided. The DfT says 33% of the country's 121,171 public chargers are classed as on-street, and Vauxhall's Freedom of Information survey of 414 councils, done between May and July 2026, found that over 70% of the on-street chargers installed to the end of 2025 were in London. Outside the capital, Coventry is the model everyone points at: its partnership with Connected Kerb has put in 1,856 sockets used by more than 9,000 residents. The same survey found 39% of councils now offer on-street charging, up from 31% in 2023, and 50% still offer none.

At the other end, the counties and towns with the fewest chargers per head are places like North East Derbyshire, Castle Point and Southend, and most of Northern Ireland. If you live in one of those, the honest answer is that the lamppost network hasn't reached you yet, and the check on the pillar page will count what actually is within a mile.

Both big networks price by the clock, and the clock is where the money is. In September 2026 char.gy is 59p a kWh from 7am to midnight on weekdays and 39p from midnight to 7am, with a flat 54p all day at weekends. ubitricity, since 1 April 2026, is 44p off-peak from midnight to 7am, 55p from 7am to 4pm and 8pm to midnight, and 66p at the 4pm to 8pm peak. A few older posts without smart charging are a flat 54p. A session that crosses a boundary is split, so plugging in at 10pm and unplugging at 7am gets two hours at the day price and seven at the night price.

In miles, at 3.4 miles per kWh, that's 11p a mile on char.gy after midnight, 13p on ubitricity off-peak, 16p to 17p by day and 19p if you plug in at teatime. Home charging on an EV tariff is about 2p, and a 45mpg petrol car is about 17p at September 2026 pump prices, so a lamppost charger is cheaper than petrol by night and about level with it by day. Most EVs can be told to start charging at midnight, and that one setting is worth about £450 a year at 8,000 miles. The cost guide has the whole table.

Councils don't choose streets by magic. They have a list of requests, a pot of money and a contractor, and they put chargers where the pavement is wide enough, the cabling is simple and the demand is written down. Dorset, to take one, asks residents to email its EV team with a proposed spot and then checks pavement width, underground services and parking restrictions before it consults the street. Most councils work the same way; search your council's name and “on-street charging” and you'll find the page.

1. Ask in writing, with the spot. Name the street, the lamppost number if it has one, and why that column: near the corner, wide pavement, no loading bay. Say you own or have ordered an EV.
2. Bring the neighbours. One request is a query; five from one street is a project. A short note through doors asking who else would use it is the single most useful thing you can do.
3. Register on Electric Streets of Britain. Vauxhall's campaign passes registered streets to the networks; more than 13,000 have signed up and Connected Kerb has put over 900 sockets within a 15-minute walk of registered postcodes.
4. Mention the money. The Local EV Infrastructure fund gives English councils £343 million of capital for exactly this, and the On-Street Residential Chargepoint Scheme has paid £64.9 million towards 19,001 chargers since 2017. A council that says it can't afford it usually can.
5. Then be patient. From request to a working socket is typically a year or more, because a public charger needs a traffic order, a contractor and a grid connection. Ask again every six months.

Half the country is in this position, so don't take it personally. The Local EV Infrastructure fund was only starting to land in the ground this year, with 1,268 chargers provisionally funded by July 2026, so a council with none today may have a plan; ask whether it has published an on-street strategy, because 32% now have. Until then there are three real alternatives.

• Work. A 7kW socket in the work car park replaces a driveway entirely, and the grant pays the employer 75% of the cost. There's a guide to asking.
• Your own front door. If you park outside your house, a cross-pavement channel plus a home charger costs about £1,300 to £2,300, and the on-street chargepoint grant pays 75% of the charger up to £500, until 31 March 2027. It needs the council's permission and a proper channel, not a cable mat, and only 59 households had used the grant by July 2026, so you'd be an early one. The channel guide covers the rules.
• The weekly rapid. At 77p a kWh it costs petrol money, but one 20-minute stop covers a normal week, and it's how plenty of people manage. The terraced-house routine shows what that week looks like.

If none of those fits, and there's no charger within a mile and no rapid within three, my answer is not yet. Keep your request in with the council, and check back in six months: this is the fastest-changing part of the whole picture.