Britain has spent years encouraging drivers to buy electric cars while quietly handing the best running costs to anyone blessed with a driveway. Park behind your own front door and cheap overnight electricity is yours. Rely on a public cable at the kerb and the same electrons arrive wearing a considerably fancier price tag. At last, the Government has admitted this is not a minor wrinkle. It is a class divide with a charging plug.
Budget 2026 sets aside £100 million over two years to cut the price of local, lower-powered public charging from spring 2027. The Treasury reckons the average EV driver who depends on on-street charging could save around £150 a year. That will not transform household finances, but it is meaningful enough to notice — and, crucially, it targets the people whom the EV transition has treated least fairly.
The slow charger is the important one
Fast chargers receive the glamorous headlines. They promise heroic power, coffee-break top-ups and the thrilling possibility that your battery will be ready before the service-station queue has surrendered your sandwich. Yet the humble street charger matters more to daily life. Leave the car there overnight, walk home and wake up with the job done. It is the public equivalent of a driveway wallbox.
The new support is aimed at those lower-powered local chargers, which the Government says make up roughly a third of the public network. That focus is sensible. Subsidising motorway rapid charging might make long trips cheaper, but it would do little to fix the everyday penalty faced by residents of terraces and flats.
The scale of that penalty is getting harder to ignore. The independent charging-cost review found that average prices for lower-powered public chargers have risen by 69 per cent in real terms since 2021. Higher-powered charging rose by 94 per cent. Meanwhile, around a third of UK households lack off-street parking or a driveway. Telling those drivers to enjoy cheap home charging has always carried the helpful air of advising a renter to build a garage.
Tariff porting is the clever idea — eventually
The more interesting proposal is ‘tariff porting’. A new taskforce will explore allowing drivers to use their domestic electricity deal at certain local public chargers. In principle, that could turn the lamppost or kerbside unit into an extension of the home meter: bring your energy tariff with you, then pay an access charge for the public hardware.
That is a far better long-term idea than endlessly pouring public money into temporary discounts. It could let competition between domestic suppliers reach people without private parking and give drivers a reason to hunt for cheap off-peak rates. It also sounds fiendishly awkward. Billing systems, charger operators, network costs and access fees all need to agree on who owes what. The Government is only establishing a taskforce, with the Department for Transport promising details later. Keep the champagne in the fridge.
The danger is obvious: a genuinely simple concept could emerge covered in eligibility zones, incompatible apps and fees with names invented by a committee. Tariff porting will succeed only if a driver can plug in locally, identify their home account and understand the final price before charging. If it needs three memberships and a spreadsheet, the driveway wins again.
The VAT sore has not disappeared
There is also a sharp edge to the announcement. The Budget confirms that electricity sold through public and workplace chargers remains subject to 20 per cent VAT. Domestic electricity receives more favourable treatment, including the current temporary zero rate in Great Britain. So the tax system still distinguishes between the person with a wallbox and the person using the kerb, even while the new policy tries to narrow the resulting gap.
The Treasury’s £100 million may soften that unfairness, but it does not remove it. Nor should an expected £150 annual saving be confused with a guaranteed reduction for every driver. We still need to know how the money reaches charge-point operators, how quickly lower prices follow and how the Government will prevent support vanishing into margins rather than bills.
Even so, this is aimed at the right target. Britain already has more than 124,000 public charge points, yet counting plugs means little if ordinary residents cannot afford to use the convenient ones near home. The EV transition will not be won by another dazzling charger at a motorway hub. It will be won at 11pm on a wet residential street, when plugging in feels boring, cheap and fair. This plan could move us closer — provided the taskforce remembers that drivers need a tariff, not another obstacle course.
Sources
- UK public EV charging plan aims to drastically slash costs
- Cutting electric vehicle charging costs
- Budget 2026
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