More than 90% of British councils have at least one public charger somewhere in their area. Half of them have none on a residential street. That gap is the whole story for the roughly 40% of UK drivers who park on the road.
The figures come from Freedom of Information responses by 414 councils across the UK, collected between May and July 2026 for Vauxhall's Electric Streets of Britain campaign, now in its fourth year.
What the responses show
| Measure | 2026 | 2023 |
|---|---|---|
| Councils with on-street charging | 39% | 31% |
| Councils with none | 50% | — |
| Published on-street residential strategy | 32% | — |
| Dedicated EV charging policy officer | 46% | 31% |
Two caveats before those numbers get quoted. The 39% and the 50% do not sum to 100, and the published reporting does not account for the remainder — non-responses and unclear answers sit in the gap, so treat both figures as reported rather than as two halves of one pie. And this is a carmaker's campaign research, not a regulator's audit; the FOI method is sound, the framing is Vauxhall's.
The direction is nonetheless real. On-street provision is up eight percentage points in three years, and the share of councils employing someone specifically to work on charging is up fifteen. Rollout has accelerated as authorities draw down Local Electric Vehicle Infrastructure funding and partner with operators such as Connect Kerb, Char.gy and Believ.
The distribution is the problem, not the total
On-street chargers make up 32% of the UK's public charging network, and 55% of everything installed during 2025 was on-street — so the mix is shifting the right way.
Then: more than 70% of Britain's on-street chargers are in London.
That single concentration explains why national percentages feel wrong to people outside the capital. A resident of a terraced street in Sheffield or Swansea is not served by a network average; they are served by whether their own council has a scheme, and for half of councils the answer is still no.
What this means for a Tesla owner
Tesla's own UK infrastructure does not help here, and it is worth being precise about why. Superchargers are DC rapid sites built for motorway and destination charging, not kerbside overnight charging. TeslAnt has covered what happens to the public chargers councils do run — an FOI of English county councils found a quarter of Hampshire's units unavailable and four councils holding no reliability data at all.
Put the two together and the picture for a driveway-less UK buyer is sharper than either study alone: provision is missing in half the country, and where it exists, nobody is reliably measuring whether it works. A Tesla parked on a street depends on a kerbside AC point that may not exist, may not work, and costs materially more per kWh than a home tariff would.
Why it matters beyond Britain
The UK is one of Tesla's larger European markets and one of the furthest along on the ZEV mandate, so its kerbside problem is a preview. Every European market with dense terraced or apartment housing faces the same arithmetic — France has wired 7% of its apartment blocks — and none has solved it by building motorway rapids.