Councils in England are sitting on £381 million of LEVI capital, and the National Audit Office's scorekeepers at the Public Accounts Committee have already said the quiet part out loud: by October 2024, only 10 of 78 LEVI projects had approval to actually deliver anything. The money was never the problem. The procurement was.
If you work in a council transport or estates team — or you run public-sector sites and keep getting told "it's with procurement" — this is the map of how EV charging actually gets bought in 2026, which frameworks are worth your time, and where the traps are.
The state of play, in numbers
The UK had roughly 73,000 public charge points in January 2025 against a 300,000 target for 2030. That means the country needs to install more than twice what it built in a decade, in half the time. And distribution is lopsided: 43% of charge points sit in London and the South East, while rural England makes do with 15%.
The government's answer for local streets is the LEVI fund — £381 million of capital for tier-1 English local authorities, plus capability funding (the money that pays for the officers who run these projects) now extended to March 2029. By summer 2026 the programme has finally moved from paperwork to purchase orders: LEVI is in its contract-review stage and seven authority tenders went live in one wave — Cambridgeshire & Peterborough, Cornwall, Derbyshire, Lancashire, Nottinghamshire, Tees Valley and the West of England.
That wave is good news and bad news. Good: contracts are actually being let. Bad: the Public Accounts Committee warned precisely this would happen — dozens of authorities hitting the market at the same time, competing for the same handful of credible charge point operators, installers and grid connections. Late movers will find supplier bid teams already committed elsewhere.
Why procurement, not hardware, is the bottleneck
The PAC's March 2025 report is unusually blunt for a parliamentary document. Delays came from authorities needing longer than expected to build capacity, and — the kicker — a late determination that some commercial frameworks authorities had planned to use didn't comply with procurement regulations, forcing strategy rewrites mid-programme.
Add the Procurement Act regime that went live on 24 February 2025, which changed the rules underneath everyone, and you can see why a council officer's honest answer to "when will the chargers arrive?" is often a shrug.
The fix isn't heroics. It's picking a compliant route early and refusing to reinvent documents that already exist.
The routes worth knowing
Crown Commercial Service — RM6213 (Vehicle Charging Infrastructure Solutions). The heavyweight option. Covers the full chain — consultancy, design, hardware, installation, operation and maintenance — and is open to local authorities, NHS trusts, central government and the wider public sector. You can direct award or run a mini-competition. It has real delivery behind it: one NHS hospital used it for 41 chargers and 21 contactless payment terminals.
ESPO — Vehicle Charging Infrastructure framework (VCI3-636-25). The council workhorse. Chargers, installation, back-office and service packages, open to councils, schools and blue-light services, with direct award and mini-competition routes. Suppliers are pre-vetted on technical capability, financial stability and pricing — which is exactly the diligence a stretched procurement team doesn't have time to repeat from scratch.
Regional frameworks. Hampshire County Council runs a Central/Southern regional EV charging framework covering feasibility through to long-term management for public bodies across the south. West Yorkshire Combined Authority has a five-year framework built to carry its CRSTS and LEVI pipeline. If you're in the footprint of one of these, they exist precisely so you don't have to run your own competition.
The open-market template route. In September 2025, CCS and the Department for Transport published a free pack of customisable procurement templates for on-street EV infrastructure — draft terms, guidance, the lot — written for the new procurement rules and reviewed by both buyers and suppliers before release. If your project doesn't fit a framework, this is the route that stops your legal team drafting a concession agreement from a blank page.
And for authorities that want a second brain on any of this: the LEVI support bodies (Energy Saving Trust, Cenex and PA Consulting) run an EVI support service, with the NEVIS data tool behind it.
Framework or open market? The honest decision guide
Direct award off a framework is the fastest compliant route to contract — weeks, not months. You trade some price tension for speed. A mini-competition claws the price tension back at the cost of a few months. A full open-market procurement gives maximum control and maximum pain, and after the PAC's findings, going off-piste without a good reason is how projects end up in the "10 of 78" club.
Whichever route you take, the contract is where charging projects live or die. Three things to demand in any call-off or concession, framework or not:
Open protocols, in writing. Chargers and back office talking OCPP — with a contractual commitment to current versions — or you are one supplier failure away from a stranded network. We've written before about what vendor lock-in actually costs.
Uptime with teeth. A 99% uptime SLA measured per-socket per-month, with service credits, not an "aspiration". Nearly half of UK EV drivers have stood in front of a broken charger; residents will judge the council, not the operator.
Tariff transparency. If it's a concession, the operator's pricing to residents is a political issue the day it goes live. Cap it, index it, or at minimum require published tariffs and a review mechanism.
If you're not a council, this still matters
NHS trusts, colleges, housing associations and blue-light services can buy through RM6213 and ESPO too — you don't need to run a tender to electrify a depot or a staff car park. And if your organisation runs fleets alongside sites, the £1 billion fleet electrification programme and the wider public-sector charging picture are the companion reads.
The uncomfortable truth in all of this: the frameworks are ready, the templates are free, the money is allocated, and the PAC has already named the failure mode. The authorities that get chargers in the ground in 2026-27 won't be the ones with the biggest allocations. They'll be the ones that picked a boring, compliant route early and spent their energy on grid connections and traffic orders instead of procurement archaeology.
If you're weighing up a route — or you're a public-sector estate that wants chargers without owning the procurement headache — talk to us. We'll tell you in one conversation which route fits, and we won't charge you £40k of consultancy to say "use the framework".
Contact SalesRead this article in the app at energy-partners.co.uk/insights/local-authority-ev-charging-procurement-frameworks-uk. Energy Partners installs and manages commercial EV charging, solar and battery storage for UK venues — talk to us.