“If you've read the press in the last year or two, the constant headline has been that there's not enough charging for electric vehicles. What has actually been happening on the ground in the last 18 months is a quite astonishing rollout of charging infrastructure.”

Ian Johnston, CEO of charging company Osprey, wants to change the narrative around the state of the charging network in this country.

He believes that charging has been unfairly lumped in with the slump in demand for the cars themselves. While gains in sales of EVs year-on-year have been marginal, Johnston told Autocar Business that the charging network has increased in size by 46% year-on-year and there are now more than 65,000 chargers operational in the UK. “And that rate and rollout is increasing all the time.”

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He says charging companies like Osprey are focused on “funding and building this infrastructure ahead of the demand for EVs”, as whatever the peaks and troughs in demand for electric cars right now, the ultimate direction of travel and end game is clear.

Yet still, Johnston points to stigma and past truths about the charging network that could in turn be holding back the wider uptake of EVs. 

“We've gone from a position of people worrying about queues or if a charger works, to now, in most cases, driving into big, high-power charging hubs,” says Johnston. He also pointed to the fact that consumers will no longer need multiple apps to pay for different chargers as standards are brought in to ensure a professional, reliable and easy-to-use service from the charging industry - with league tables showing the best and worst providers. 

“The chargers installed in the last two years are reliable, easy to use, easy to pay; you just tap a bank card. The legacy chargers that are five, six or seven years old are such a tiny proportion of what's in the ground.”

Johnston says it was “disappointing” and “so unnecessary” that the lack of charging was one of the reasons the previous government pushed the ban on the sale of non-electric cars back to 2035.

“But the good news is we’ve addressed one of the major reasons not to make the switch. We now just need the [new] government to work with industry to help generate more retail demand [for the cars themselves].”

The charging network could be expanding at an even faster rate if planning permissions and highway permits (to connect to high-voltage power supplies often already in the roads) are granted sooner. Johnston says there are thousands of charging installations across the industry in the pipeline, and the network could almost double in size again.