A Freedom of Information request to 17 English county councils has produced the kind of answer that explains why public charging still feels like a lottery: several of them do not know whether their own chargers work.
Close Brothers Motor Finance filed the requests. Four councils — Lancashire, West Sussex, Nottinghamshire and Essex — said they hold no fault or reliability data at all. West Sussex was the most explicit about why: the operational data belongs to Connected Kerb, the operator, and is therefore not information the authority holds.
The Hampshire number
| Council | What it reported |
|---|---|
| Hampshire | 39 of 157 chargers unavailable, 27 switched off deliberately |
| Leicestershire | 10 of 53 sockets permanently removed from service |
| Northumberland | 97% uptime across 487 chargers, monitored hourly |
| Surrey | Downtime below 3% across 411 sockets |
| Lancashire, West Sussex, Nottinghamshire, Essex | No reliability data held |
Hampshire's quarter-of-the-network figure is the headline, but the breakdown matters more than the total. Only 12 of those 39 were down for reasons other than a deliberate switch-off. The other 27 were turned off on purpose because too few people were using them.
That is a different problem with a different fix. A broken charger is a maintenance failure. A charger switched off for low utilisation is a siting failure — someone put a post where the demand was not, and the meter standing charge kept running. Councils installed a great deal of on-street hardware on capital grants that did not fund the operating cost of an empty bay.
The data gap is the regulatory story
Britain's Public Charge Point Regulations require operators to maintain chargepoints and report on reliability. The Close Brothers report puts operator compliance with those reliability targets at 4% — 96% miss them. When the authority that owns the asset says the numbers belong to its contractor, there is no one in the chain a driver can hold to a standard.
Northumberland and Surrey show it is not inherent. Hourly monitoring across 487 chargers producing 97% uptime is a council that treats the network as infrastructure it operates rather than hardware it once bought.
Why this lands on Tesla owners too
Supercharging is not the exposure here. The exposure is the large minority of British households with no off-street parking, for whom an on-street council post is the home charger. A Tesla owner in that position pays public rates every night and depends on a bay that a spreadsheet somewhere may have quietly switched off.
It also feeds the demand side. In the same research, 52% of drivers said they never use public charging at all, citing safety (17%), cost (13%), busy or unavailable chargers (10%) and unreliability (8%). That is a used-EV market problem as much as a new-car one, in a country where used EVs now sell in 25 days and Tesla holds three of the top ten. The cars are moving. The infrastructure story is what the next buyer worries about.
What to take from it
If you rely on council on-street charging in England, the practical read is that reliability varies by county rather than by operator brand, and that four county councils cannot tell you their record because they do not keep it. Apps that crowdsource charger status are doing work the asset owner is not.
John Cassidy, managing director at Close Brothers Motor Finance, framed the finding as a confidence problem rather than a hardware one. On this evidence it is both, and the measurable half is not being measured.