Cross-pavement chargers need no planning permission from today, and the bill drops

The government calls it an everyday fix, and on the day it takes effect the framing is doing most of the work. From 21 October, households in England no longer need planning permission to fit a cross-pavement charger, the gully that runs a cable under the pavement from the house to a car parked on the street. Ministers say it will save drivers up to £300 on installation and open up home charging at as little as 2p per mile.

That is the consumer end of the order we set out what the legal change does when it takes effect. The legal mechanics are unchanged: the charger and the channel are separate permissions, and laying a cable across the pavement still needs the highway authority's permission under section 178 of the Highways Act 1980. What changes today is that the household no longer has to file a planning application for the gully itself, and the cost and delay go with it.

The savings are the point. Cross-pavement charging lets residents without off-street parking plug into cheaper domestic electricity, and the government puts the running-cost saving at up to £1,750. For someone without a driveway, that is the difference between being able to afford an electric car and ruling one out altogether, in the words of Vicky Edmonds, chief executive of EVA England.

Her research found that 60% of petrol and diesel drivers without off-street parking would never consider an EV. Being able to connect a street-parked car to cheaper home electricity could help change that, she says, provided local authorities and landlords make the solutions easy to access in practice. That last clause is the honest part of the quote, and it is where the reform runs into the real world.

The September figures do the same work from the other direction. It was a record month, up 36% in a year, with nearly 100,000 electric cars sold in a single month. The Electric Car Grant has now helped over 190,000 drivers save up to £3,750 off a new EV. We worked through what those figures meant in September when the consultation response landed, and the record is still the strongest electric month the UK has had.

The postcode lottery

The reform is genuine, and it is not universal. More than 20 local authorities still will not allow gullies to be installed, according to the Guardian, among them Kent, Leicester and Worcestershire, with most of the holdouts in London, including Waltham Forest and Hackney. Ealing, which does not allow them for cost and safety reasons, is the case the paper leads on: an owner there has charged at public points at far higher cost for two years and still cannot fit one at home.

The reasons are safety and liability as much as money. Waltham Forest says gullies raise concerns about the safety and accessibility of footways, parking pressures, maintenance, and who is liable if someone is injured. The Local Government Association says councils want to support on-street charging but have limited resources and significant demands to meet. The result is that a household in one borough can fit a gully more or less freely while a neighbour across the river cannot.

Caroline Pidgeon, the Liberal Democrat peer who campaigned for the change, says one in three households in England do not have a driveway and that approval took up to 15 months in some areas before the rule change. The government has put £25m into council pavement-gully schemes, but the Guardian reports the money is being distributed in different ways, so some councils subsidise channels while funds last and others do not.

What it costs

Even where a gully is allowed, the price varies widely. Kerbo Charge, an installer, puts the average fee at about £1,200 including VAT without a grant; Surrey charges £499 for the channel and installation, South Gloucestershire £250. Some councils also levy an annual fee, £185 in Redbridge and £107 in Enfield. That is before the charger itself, and it is why the £300 saving on the planning step is real but not the whole bill.

The gap between home and public charging is what makes the effort worthwhile. ChargeUK, the charging industry body, puts off-peak at-home charging at about 8p per kWh against a standard public rate of 54p, and one owner the Guardian spoke to charges his van at home for £6 where a public point would cost £30 to £63 for the same electricity. That is the arithmetic behind the government's running-cost figure, and it survives the postcode lottery only for households whose council says yes.

What to do with it

The sequence from today is not complicated, and the planning step is only one part of it. Start with the highway authority, and ask whether a channel is acceptable at that address and who is allowed to install it, then establish who will own and maintain it afterwards. The installer has to work to the authorisation the authority gives, because the charger and the channel are separate permissions even when they are one job.

Where a channel is not an option at all, the council-run alternative is the route, and we set out how those schemes work. The reform is genuine: for a terraced street in a willing borough, the planning application disappears and the cost and delay with it. The catch is that the borough decides, and the household finds out when it asks.

The postcode lottery

What it costs

What to do with it

Sources