The ownership of EV chargepoints in the public realm is a new uncertain challenge for councils, given the rising public expectation and government’s opaque guidance regarding resources/funding. For a council, who are seen by the public as a trusted local provider, the problem is how we translate policy and funding into physical, publicly accessible charge points, whilst meeting procurement, consultation, and other requirements.
Summary
The ownership of EV chargepoints in the public realm is a new uncertain challenge for councils, given the rising public expectation and government’s opaque guidance regarding resources/funding. For a council, who are seen by the public as a trusted local provider, the problem is how we translate policy and funding into physical, publicly accessible charge points, whilst meeting procurement, consultation, and other requirements.
To progress this, we are holding a soft market event to link up the individual service expectations with supplier/operator deliverables, with the aim of generating evidence and information for a wide scale multiple lot procurement, to provide an internal framework for services to utilise and make the transformative step to low carbon vehicles.
What is the challenge?
The challenge for Luton is how to build and sustain the behaviour change needed, with both internal teams and the public, so that the understanding of the council is as an enabler rather than the default sole provider.
This ambition is not a move away from the council being the prime public service provider in the town, rather, a reflection that in 2023, the scope and nature of the services required for the effective/sustainable working of any town is one based on a series of interlocking partnerships between several stakeholders.
The council has assets in the form of physical ones such as car parks, lighting columns and buildings as well as public facing policies and strategies and has the trusted brand of the local authority. This combination is part of the enabling aspect of the leadership that the council can and does provide for what will be transformative change. Importantly it is not single strand of work but part of a corporate wider vision, to have no one in poverty in the town by 2040.
Funding is perhaps the most visible aspect of the challenge we have regarding EV charge points, not only in terms of delivery but also public expectation that chargepoints should be available almost on every street.
However, the greatest universal challenge is the unseen one, regarding local grid capacity. This is an area which as we transition away from combustion engine powered vehicles will increasingly come to the fore and be the defining aspect of a town-wide move to EV’s.
To address this challenge for Luton, we are delivering an in person soft market event for individual services; housing, fleet, parking, and highways to put forward their own service expectations with an invited audience of charge point operators/suppliers (CPO’s), with a follow on workshop using Miro or similar to provide two dialogue to identify keys asks. We hope that this will, alongside a recently adopted EV strategy, put Luton to the fore in terms of the CPO’s and residents.
As a result of the action learning set programme what actions will you now take to address the challenge?
The ALS programme provided a group who not only understood the local authority working/service environment but also contributed extremely focused and relevant experiences from other officers. The importance of other officers having previously addressed challenges or delivered a change/service that engaged with a targeted network was invaluable, even if it was a large or small snippet of information.
In terms of specific actions from the ALS, one which springs to mind is the discussion regarding use of Fields Dynamics modelling data, we immediately started to access/use this and it has helped add to the evidence for future EV work streams.
What will be the impact?
The immediate impact has been to overcome some silo thinking in various teams regarding responsibility/accountability with a move to a joined up approach to what is a significant enabling focus for a major behaviour change provision. This has been step change, to push this wider thinking into practice for other work streams including sustainable travel options cycling, walking, and wheeling. This is of particular importance when transitioning from a policy development team to implementation and delivery teams.
In terms of carbon savings, various publications set out carbon reductions of up to 2/3 when comparing EV’s with combustion engine vehicles, but for most the main personal saving will be a reduction in annual running costs, with a drop of at least 50 per cent when petrol costs are taken against electricity costs.
How the energy for the charging is generated can have a major effect, but with road traffic accounting for over 10 per cent of global emissions, changing citizens behaviour in terms of their personal vehicle is one which can only help promote acceptance of the wider societal changes needed to meet some of the climate/carbon targets.
In Luton we have over 80,000 private cars, so even a 10 per cent shift would reduce carbon emissions and by default improve air quality, which for an urban council is a political as well as public health challenge.
How will you look to sustain the approach in the long term?
In terms of sustainable delivery, our focus is on building up the internal resourcing to ensure that we can bid for grants, maintain internal relationships, and importantly provide a focal point for the public, contractors, and key stakeholders. We aim to do this by having a dedicated EV officer as well as building better governance for more sustainable decision making, thereby maximising the impact of any short term gains to become long term sustainable behaviour changes. The solutions we anticipate from the EV event/resource will change with technology and innovation, but our hope is that we will be at the fore, proactive rather than reactive.
Lessons learned
As mentioned, some of the wider lessons from the ALS process have been moving away from silo thinking, not least by the process having so many different officers involved, all with similar yet different challenges e.g. the rural, two tier but often with common challenge including recruitment, member driven challenges.
A common thread of challenges resulting from short timescales with government grants/schemes was a thread through all of the ALS sessions and was perhaps the message that government needs to take on board.