Rapid chargers per 100,000 people: Scotland 59.1. Wales 42.8. London 27.9.
Read that again. The city hoovering up the biggest share of new charging investment is below the UK average on the chargers that actually matter — and, on the latest leasing-industry data, it's the slowest-growing EV market in the country. The Department for Transport's new combined charging statistics, published 27 August, put hard numbers on something we've been telling site owners for a year: the network is being built where the chargers already are, not where the drivers are turning up.
If you own or run a site outside London, this release is quietly making your business case for you. Here's what's in it.
The headline numbers
As at 1 July 2026, the UK had 121,171 public EV chargers — up 10.0% on the 110,132 recorded a year earlier. The fast end of the network is growing quicker than the whole: 28,887 rapid and ultra-rapid chargers (50kW+), up 16.4% from 24,813 in July 2025. Operators' capital is chasing dwell time and throughput, exactly as you'd expect.
Two health warnings before anyone puts these in a board pack.
First, the DfT changed its yardstick in January 2026: it now counts chargers, not "devices", and has restated the back-series to match. So the honest year-on-year comparison is against the restated 110,132 — not against the "82,002 devices" headlines you may remember from last summer. Anyone comparing new-metric numbers with old-metric headlines is either confused or selling something.
Second, the monthly figure actually fell by 91 chargers between June and July. Slowdown? No — one operator reclassified around 1,270 private-access chargers out of public reporting. Strip the paperwork noise and rapid chargers still added 513 in the month. Read the trend, not one month's bookkeeping.
The lopsided map
Now the part the press releases skip. Charger density per 100,000 people:
| Region | All chargers | Rapid (50kW+) | |---|---|---| | London | 345.1 | 27.9 | | Scotland | 231.6 | 59.1 | | Wales | 185.5 | 42.8 | | UK average | 174.9 | 41.7 | | Northern Ireland | 60.0 | 19.3 |
London has nearly double the national charger density on the headline count — and is a third below the national average on rapid coverage. The capital's network is dense with lamppost and on-street slow chargers: genuinely useful if you live there and charge overnight, close to irrelevant if you're a venue trying to capture a driver who wants 80% in half an hour.
Scotland, meanwhile, has more than twice London's rapid coverage per head. The "charging desert" story you've read about the regions is out of date at the fast end — but the totals still tell every investment committee to keep pouring money into zone 1–6.
Demand is growing fastest where the investment isn't
Here's the collision. Hippo Leasing's August analysis of the same landscape found London's EV fleet grew just 20.9% year on year — the slowest of any UK region. The South East grew 53.5%. The North East 45.5%. Wales 42.9%.
Nationally, the UK's EV fleet hit around 2.84 million vehicles by the end of 2025, up 33% in a year — while public chargers grew 22.8% over the same period. The result: the national EVs-per-charger ratio worsened from 30.6 to 33.1. And the averages hide the ugly bits: Stockport is running at roughly 685 EVs per public charger, and Cheshire West and Chester went from 36 to 184 in twelve months.
Against that backdrop, Allego — one of Europe's biggest charging operators — announced a €100 million UK rollout of up to 1,400 ultra-rapid chargers by 2030… prioritising London. Hippo's chief executive put it politely: "Allego prioritising London makes sense on paper, but our data shows London's EV growth is actually lagging behind the rest of the country."
We'd put it less politely. Big operators plan on yesterday's map. That's not a conspiracy; it's how utilisation models work — they're fed with historic session data, and historic session data lives where chargers already exist. The model can't see the Stockport driver who never charges publicly because there's nowhere to do it.
What this means if your site is outside London
Put the two datasets together and the picture for a regional site owner — pub, retail park, gym, hotel, leisure venue, anywhere drivers already park for 30 minutes or more — looks like this:
- Your driver base is growing at roughly double London's rate. The South East, North East and Wales are all adding EVs at 40–55% a year.
- Your local rapid provision is thin and demand-per-charger is worsening. A national ratio moving from 30.6 to 33.1 EVs per charger means queues and frustrated drivers — each one a customer someone's site could be capturing.
- The biggest new pot of CPO capital just pointed itself at the one region where growth is slowest. Less competition for the catchments that are actually growing.
That's the definition of an underserved market. Councils have spotted it too — the £381m LEVI programme is pushing chargers into exactly these areas through local-authority procurement, but LEVI is aimed mostly at residential on-street need. Destination and en-route rapid charging at commercial sites is still, in most regional catchments, first-mover territory.
Three checks worth running this week
One: your local ratio. Count the public rapid chargers within a ten-minute drive of your site, then look at DVLA licensing growth for your area. If your patch looks anything like the national 33.1-and-worsening, you have latent demand on your doorstep.
Two: your dwell time. If typical visits run 30 minutes to 2 hours, you're in the sweet spot for 50–150kW charging — long enough to sell a meaningful charge, short enough to turn bays over.
Three: your contract terms. If an operator does come knocking with "free" chargers, remember who plans on yesterday's map — and make sure the hardware runs certified OCPP so you're not welded to them when their strategy changes.
The DfT will publish the next quarterly cut in the autumn. The regional gap won't have closed by then — but in the catchments growing at 50% a year, the best sites will start being taken.
We survey commercial sites across the UK — outside the M25 very much included — and we'll tell you straight whether your catchment stacks up, what utilisation you could expect, and which funding routes apply. Book a site survey and bring these numbers with you.
Site SurveyRead this article in the app at energy-partners.co.uk/insights/uk-ev-charging-statistics-july-2026-regional-gap. Energy Partners installs and manages commercial EV charging, solar and battery storage for UK venues — talk to us.