Fifteen years and a 30p margin cap: what council LEVI charging contracts tell private sites about operator deals

Charge point operators don't publish their site agreements. Councils have to.

Under the government's Local Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (LEVI) fund, councils across England are signing long concession deals with operators to put thousands of chargers on their streets and car parks. Because it's public money, the cabinet papers are public too. And the latest one, from Peterborough on 1 October 2026, sets out more commercial detail than any private host agreement we've seen.

If you run a hotel, retail park, leisure site or office and an operator has offered to "fully fund" chargers on your land, these papers are the closest thing you'll get to a benchmark. Here's what councils with procurement teams and lawyers actually negotiated, and what's worth copying.

The Peterborough deal, in numbers

Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Combined Authority ran a joint procurement with its councils. Peterborough's cabinet report recommends awarding the concession to Believ, which scored 92.80% against 66.35% for the next bidder. The headline terms:

• Term: a 15-year concession from 1 November 2026, with an option to extend by one year.
• Volume: 1,058 chargepoints in Peterborough against a contract minimum of 185. That's about 4.5 times what the council asked for. Across the whole joint programme it's 5,585 against a minimum of 930.
• Delivery deadlines: the 930 required chargepoints within years 1 to 4, all 5,585 by the end of year 7.
• Public money: the combined authority's LEVI capital award is £5,437,000. Peterborough's share, £1,075,770, is the most Believ can draw for installation. The rest is the operator's own capital.
• Tariffs, written into the contract: 38p/kWh peak and 36p/kWh off-peak in year 1, rising to 52p peak and 41p off-peak from year 2.
• A margin cap: Believ can charge no more than 30p/kWh above its electricity cost.
• Income to the council: a fixed £15,000 a year for contract administration, plus 1p for every kWh sold, paid annually in arrears.
• Hardware: Believ must refresh all the chargepoint hardware at the mid-point of the contract.
• Risk: the operator carries installation, operation, maintenance, technology and utilisation risk. The council can ask for a parent company guarantee.

What the report doesn't publish is just as telling: no uptime target, no figure for the private investment and no statement on who owns the kit at the end.

It's not a one-off

The same shape keeps turning up:

• Hertfordshire: 15-year concession to 1 December 2041 (including a one-year extension), with multiple operators. £56m of operator investment against £6m of LEVI capital, so roughly £9 of private money for every £1 of public. Minimum 1,500 chargepoints (3,000 sockets) over three years. Operators earn directly from drivers and carry the demand risk.
• Shropshire: cabinet approved a 15-year concession, 2027 to 2042, in March 2026. More than £2m of LEVI money, 500 or more extra chargers, an annual concession fee and a share of revenue that rises with usage.
• Portsmouth: a 15-year concession "extendable by a further year if required to enable effective demobilisation". A guaranteed management fee plus a gain-share mechanism. The council forecasts about £26.6m of operator turnover over 15 years, roughly £1.8m a year.

Fifteen years is the market standard for a funded charging deal. If an operator offers your site 20 or 25, ask why it needs longer than a council gave it.

Five things private sites should copy

1. Put the tariff in the contract, not the brochure. Peterborough didn't accept "competitive pricing". It fixed a schedule and capped the margin at 30p/kWh above cost. For comparison, Zapmap's price index puts the September 2026 average for slow and fast public charging at 54p/kWh, and rapid and ultra-rapid at 79p/kWh. Peterborough's year-2 peak rate of 52p sits just under the slow and fast average, and the cap stops it drifting far above it.

Most private host agreements give the operator full control of the price. Your customers then blame your venue when it's too high. You don't need a council-style schedule, but you can ask for a cap linked to the operator's energy cost, or a commitment to stay within a set range of the local average.

2. Make the operator over-deliver, on a timetable. Peterborough asked for 185 chargepoints and got 1,058, because the bids competed on volume as well as price. And the contract has hard delivery dates: years 1 to 4 for the minimum, year 7 for the lot.

That second part matters more than it looks. char.gy, one of the LEVI operators, said in October that 674 LEVI-funded connectors were live across Brighton & Hove and Reading on Zapmap data, against more than 60,000 sockets planned across the 11 LEVI projects awarded to date. Signed isn't installed. A private agreement with no go-live date can leave your best bays reserved for years with nothing on them. Ask for an install deadline, and a right to walk away if it's missed.

3. Ask for a hardware refresh. Fifteen years is three or four generations of charging hardware. Peterborough wrote a mid-point refresh into the deal. Most private agreements say nothing about it, so in year 10 your customers are plugging into kit that's already a decade old. Ask for a refresh date, or a clause that obliges the operator to replace units that fall below an agreed reliability level.

4. Get security behind the promise. A parent company guarantee means that if the local operating company folds, the group behind it is still on the hook. Councils ask for it because charging is a young market and operators have been bought, merged and refinanced. If you're signing 15 years with a special-purpose subsidiary, ask who stands behind it.

5. Plan the exit before you sign. Portsmouth built in an extra year just to take the network down properly. Private agreements often leave removal, making good and bay reinstatement vague. Write down who removes the kit, who pays, and what condition the car park is left in. And insist on open-protocol (OCPP) hardware, so at the end of the term the chargers can be handed to another operator instead of ripped out.

The uncomfortable bit: councils didn't do it for the money

Look at what Peterborough actually earns. 1p a kWh. Say a dual 7kW on-street post sells 5,000kWh a year, which is plausible on a residential street in its early years. That's £50 a year in revenue share from that post, before the £15,000 admin fee is counted.

Councils traded income for three things: low and predictable prices for residents, lots of chargers, and someone else carrying the risk. That's the right trade for a council. It may not be the right trade for you.

A hotel, retail park or leisure site has things a residential street doesn't: long dwell times, repeat visitors, good grid connections and customers who'll pay for convenience. Operators compete hard for those sites. So your negotiation should start from a different place:

• If you want income, push for a real revenue share as a percentage of sales, with audit rights, rather than a token per-kWh fee.
• If you want customers, push for tariff guardrails, a site-level uptime figure and a say in bay layout.
• If you want flexibility, push for a break clause at year 5 or 7, a carve-out for your own staff and fleet charging, and a reserved share of your grid connection.

You probably can't get all three at the top end. Decide which matters most before the first meeting. Our checklist of 10 terms to negotiate in a fully funded deal goes clause by clause.

One more reason to fix the price now

Public charging prices are under official review. OZEV's Cost of Public Charging Review, chaired independently by Philip New, is due to report to ministers this autumn. It covers on-street, destination and en-route charging, compares the cost with petrol and diesel, and will set out options to bring prices down. It won't make recommendations on tax, so the 20% VAT on public charging, against 5% at home, is out of scope.

Whatever it recommends, expect more attention on what drivers pay at destination chargers. If your site's name is on the bays, a tariff you agreed in writing is a lot easier to defend than one the operator set on its own.

Our take

Councils have spent two years and a lot of legal fees working out what a fair 15-year charging deal looks like. Their papers are free to read. Use them.

Fifteen years, a fixed or capped tariff, hard delivery dates, a hardware refresh, a guarantee and a planned exit are now the public-sector baseline. A private site with better footfall and dwell time than a residential street should be asking for at least that, plus a better revenue share.

Looking at an operator offer on a leisure or retail site? See how a national network landed a 22-bay hub on a leisure park. If you're in the public sector yourself, our guide to council EV charging procurement frameworks covers the buying routes.

Got an operator offer on the table?

Send it to us. We'll survey your site, compare the terms against what councils are getting in their LEVI concessions, check your grid headroom, and tell you which clauses to push back on, including whether owning the chargers would beat the deal. No obligation.

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