The £190m motorway charging plan has not yet shown it will add chargers

The £190 million scheme to upgrade electricity connections at English motorway services has not yet shown that it will produce charging capacity that would not otherwise exist. The Competition and Markets Authority's Subsidy Advice Unit, which published its report on 4 November, lists five gaps in the case put forward by the Office for Zero Emission Vehicles. Three of the scheme's terms are also still undecided.

What £190 million would buy

The Strategic Charging Infrastructure Scheme is the government's second attempt at the grid problem at motorway service areas. An indicative £190 million has been set aside from the £400 million announced at the 2025 Spending Review for EV charging between 2026 and 2030. The money would go to between 15 and 25 of England's 116 service areas.

The mechanism is unusual. OZEV would commission electricity network upgrades at the selected sites, then reserve the new capacity for motorway service area operators or charge point operators. Those firms would apply to the connection provider and pay a "second comer" charge, which the government would partially waive. The proposed waiver is £150,000 to £200,000 per megavolt-ampere of capacity, with an indicative cap of £20 million per site for infrastructure costs. Capacity would be reserved for three to five years, and anything unclaimed would then become available to any energy user without subsidy.

Charge points, cabling, substations and civil works would stay with the operators, which keeps the subsidy on the connection to the grid.

Five gaps in the case

The report credits OZEV with a clear policy objective and a thorough weighing of benefits against distortions. It then sets out what OZEV's assessment should do before the scheme goes further. It should start with the most likely counterfactual for the targeted sites, separating investment that would be delayed from investment that would never happen. It should then show how the scheme changes beneficiaries' incentives and excludes sites that would have been funded commercially, and explain what mechanism guarantees that subsidised capacity turns into working chargers. The report also asks for further design choices that could limit distortions, and for a fuller assessment of the effects on competition and investment, including the wider benefits that service area operators might collect from publicly funded infrastructure.

The subsidy unit also points out that the scheme is not finished. The size of the subsidy, the cap on site connection costs and the reservation period are all still open. Until they are fixed, the report says, the assessment cannot reach a firm view on whether the subsidy is proportionate or whether it distorts competition. The report is non-binding advice and does not rule on whether the scheme should proceed.

The counterfactual is the hard part

Everything in the scheme depends on a claim about what would happen without it. If a service area would have secured a grid upgrade and chargers within a few years anyway, a subsidy moves the investment forward and adds little. If the upgrade would never happen on commercial terms, the subsidy buys capacity that would otherwise be missing. The gap between those two cases is the gap between £190 million well spent and £190 million spent on something the market was about to do.

OZEV's case is that coordination failure holds the network back: drivers hesitate to buy electric cars without chargers, and investors hesitate to build chargers without enough electric cars. It also cites the environmental benefits that private investors do not price, and the high upfront cost of connecting remote service areas to the grid.

A third-party submission questioned the scale of that failure. It argued that off-motorway charging, home charging, longer vehicle ranges and alternative technologies could all reduce future demand at service areas, and that some constraints reflect commercial choices rather than a market failure. The subsidy unit did not adopt that view, but it did ask OZEV to explain how the charging market might develop without the scheme, including the effect of the ZEV mandate.

Competition at 116 service areas

The service area market is concentrated. Six operators control England's 116 sites, and the operator of a site controls who can install chargers there. The subsidy unit records a third party's warning that an operator with its own charging business could favour it, and that the scheme does not reproduce the Rapid Charging Fund's requirement for at least two charge point operators at a supported site.

That matters more this month than it did last year. Under commitments the CMA accepted in March 2022, Gridserve agreed not to enforce exclusive rights in its Electric Highway contracts with Extra, Moto and Roadchef after 18 November 2026. Those contracts covered around two thirds of motorway service areas in the UK. The long exclusivity that shaped the market ends within a fortnight, just as OZEV weighs how to allocate subsidised grid capacity.

The report asks OZEV to assess the wider benefits that service area operators might gain from infrastructure paid for by the taxpayer, the effect on competition between operators at the same site, and the effect on investment at nearby sites that receive nothing.

The £70 million precedent

The scheme exists because its predecessor failed. The Rapid Charging Fund was announced in 2020 with £950 million attached, then tested through a £70 million pilot launched in December 2023. The pilot concluded without making any awards. OZEV's own account says service area operators were not willing to contract directly with government on the terms required, despite extensive negotiations.

The new design removes that sticking point by contracting with connection providers instead. It also moves the risk. Government would pay for grid assets before knowing which operator will use them, which is why the subsidy unit wants evidence that capacity will be taken up and turned into chargers. OZEV has said it could introduce regulation requiring a minimum charging provision if take-up is low, a fallback that would only be needed if the subsidy failed to fill the sites.

What it means for a driver

Nothing changes yet. No sites have been named and no start date has been set. The subsidy reduces the cost of the grid connection, not the price at the charger, so its effect on what a driver pays is indirect. The scheme's own assessment says the benefits are likely to go mainly to long-distance drivers, and that any extra benefit for drivers without home charging may be limited because motorway charging generally costs more than charging at home or at a destination.

The backdrop is a network that has grown quickly. There were more than 1,740 rapid and ultra-rapid charge points at motorway service areas by July 2026, more than triple the number a few years earlier. Electric cars took 32.0% of October's new car registrations, so pressure on those sites is rising. Our guide to motorway service chargers covers what the network offers today, and the public charging price tracker follows what drivers pay for it.

The numbers to watch are the final per-site cap, the final reservation period, the list of service areas, and whether OZEV adds a duty to install chargers within the reservation window. Until those are settled, the £190 million is a proposal with a regulator's homework list attached, not a building programme.

Sources

• Competition and Markets Authority, "Referral of the proposed Strategic Charging Infrastructure Scheme by the Office for Zero Emission Vehicles", 24 September 2026, updated 4 November 2026. gov.uk
• Subsidy Advice Unit, "Subsidy Advice Unit report on the Strategic Charging Infrastructure scheme", 4 November 2026. pdf
• Department for Transport, "Strategic charging infrastructure scheme", 26 June 2026. gov.uk
• Competition and Markets Authority, "Investigation into the supply of electric vehicle chargepoints on or near motorways", 8 March 2022. gov.uk