Inequalities in EV charging points across the North are why I’m not ditching my diesel car - Jayne Dowle

Not to mention unprofessional. Imagine if I constantly turned up late for appointments because I’d found myself hunting for an available EV charger at a motorway services, garage or supermarket.

I have friends and family happily driving EVs and they tell me that I’m massively over-thinking it.

But almost without exception, they all work from home, or do the same commute every day, or only travel long distances for leisure, so have plenty of time to plan their routes according to where they can stop off. I might get a call in the morning and be asked to drive to Penrith to do an interview at lunchtime. I need to feel secure in my ability to get there and back.

Perhaps it’s because I’m a control freak, one friend suggested, not entirely kindly. I’d argue that actually, it’s because I’ve looked at the maps of EV charging points across the North, and seen the figures, and neither fill me with confidence.

Needless to say, public EV charging point rollout has been uneven across the country, with wealthier areas favoured because more affluent drivers are more likely to own electric cars, although there are now models for less than £10,000.

Only the other week, charging company Zest revealed that a quarter of England’s most important A-roads have electric car charging ‘cold spots’, significant gaps in provision which could leave EV drivers stranded.

Using data obtained from the Department of Transport, Zest found that 29 out of 107 A-roads that are part of England’s strategic road network have at least one cold spot. These include the A1 north of Peterborough, the A19 connecting Doncaster, York, Middlesbrough and Newcastle, the A63 between Leeds, Selby and Hull and the A64, the super-busy coastal route linking Leeds, York and Scarborough.

And now, after a Yorkshire Post investigation found that Yorkshire and the Humber has the lowest number of public chargers per person of any region in Britain, the government’s Public Accounts Committee says too few EV chargers have been installed outside London and the Southeast.

According to figures compiled in January, Yorkshire and the Humber has just 65.6 charging stations per 100,000 people, compared with 250.4 in London and 96.6 in the Southeast. In addition, not one of these, nationwide, is fully accessible for disabled drivers.

Whilst the Department of Transport likes to trumpet that our region is benefitting from one of the fastest roll-outs across the country - pointing out that 1,000 public charge points were added to the network last year, a 36 per cent increase, similar to the rate nationally - it’s clear that it’s not just numbers that count, but convenience.

The problem, as Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown MP for North Cotswolds and chair of the PAC Committee, asserts, is that the roll-out is not taking place equally. Some areas, including our own, are bereft.

“Meeting numerical targets for charging points is all very well,” Clifton-Brown says. “Delivering thousands of points allowing Londoners to easily zip around the capital while leaving the rest of the UK’s network patchy is obviously an outcome to be avoided. We are risking baking a serious injustice into the fabric of a major part of our national infrastructure.”

The PAC committee is urging ministers to commit to “a complete range of charging points as soon as possible to provide some confidence to drivers who wish to travel around the entire country”.

To be fair, to date, no government’s record on EVs is admirable. Only 10 of the 78 projects under the £450m Local Electric Vehicle Infrastructure programme were due to be finished by the deadline of this month, March 2025.

And ministers have also missed a target for every motorway service station to have at least six ultra rapid chargers by the end of 2023. By January, only 80 of 114 service stations compiled.

We can only ask, just what has been going on at the Department of Transport? The Secretary of State, Heidi Alexander, cannot afford to ignore the PAC committee’s findings.