The Netherlands is held up, rightly, as everything Britain should aspire to be on electric vehicle charging. A country of barely 18 million people has built a network of more than 210,000 public chargers. Amsterdam alone has 17.4 chargers for every thousand inhabitants.
In Greater London - the best-served city in the United Kingdom - the figure is 2.9. Amsterdam has six times more charging infrastructure per head than the capital of a country that has staked its industrial future on the electric vehicle transition by 2030.
But before we accept the Dutch comparison as a counsel of despair, we should ask the right question. Not: why is London so far behind Amsterdam? But: why did Amsterdam get so far ahead?
The answer is policy consistency. For two decades, successive Dutch governments treated EV charging the way we treat roads and water mains - as a public good requiring long-term commitment and a refusal to let short-term politics blow the strategy off course.
In Britain, the signals have changed constantly - from the back and forth on the fossil fuel phase out date, zig-zagging on ZEV and the introduction of a pay-per-mile road tax for EVs, to council planning and grid bottlenecks, VAT harmonisation and the lingering question of business rates on public chargers.
None of which should obscure the fact that London is, by some distance, the best model the rest of England has. Greater London's 26,668 public charge points - nearly a third of all the chargers in the country, serving just 11 per cent of its EV drivers - sit at a density of almost 17 per sq km. The average London driver is 126 metres from a public charger. In Newcastle, that distance is 336 metres. In Birmingham, 241. In Sheffield, 288. These are not trivial differences. They are the physical expression of a two-tier country, and they explain why range anxiety persists as a barrier to EV adoption outside the capital.
To match London's density, Birmingham would need to more than triple its chargers. Newcastle would need to increase its network sevenfold. To reach even half of London's density by 2030, these cities would need to install up to fourteen new chargers every single month. There is no central mandate requiring them to do so.
But here I have to be honest - about London, and about our own industry. More chargers alone will not solve this. For too long, the EV charging sector has been guilty of a seductive fallacy: build it and they will come. The result, in too many places, is charging points standing idle - the wrong offer in the wrong place, monuments to wasted capital. Numbers without utilisation are not infrastructure. They are street furniture.
The real battleground is not how many chargers a city has. It is whether every charger that exists actually works, is easy to use, and leaves the driver wanting to return.
Today's EV driver does not compare a charging point to the one they used last year. They compare it to the best technology in their lives - as reliable as Apple, as frictionless as ordering a cab.
Meet that standard and the transition accelerates. Fall short, and the hesitant majority stays hesitant. London did not build its charging lead by accident. It built it through clear targets, public land released to private operators, and demand-side policy that made EV ownership the rational choice. That model is replicable. It has not been replicated - and without meaningful support for the cities that lag furthest behind, it will not be.
The Dutch did not build 210,000 chargers by hoping the market would sort itself out. They decided it was a national priority and held the course. The UK has the ambition, the deadline, and in London, a model that demonstrably works. What it lacks is the consistency to apply that model everywhere - and the honesty to admit that numbers on a spreadsheet are not the same thing as drivers who come back tomorrow.
If the Zero Emission Vehicle (ZEV) mandate is to be the engine of the transition, then charging infrastructure must be the road it runs on. The mandate cannot succeed as a set of compliance targets for manufacturers alone; it has to be matched by a network that drivers trust, use, and return to every day, in every part of the country. Without that alignment, between policy ambition and lived reality, the ZEV mandate risks becoming a theoretical success and a practical failure.
Asif Ghafoor is Co-Founder and CEO of Be.EV
