A Freedom of Information investigation by Close Brothers Motor Finance found that 39 of Hampshire's 157 public chargers are unavailable, with 27 switched off due to low use, while Lancashire, West Sussex, Nottinghamshire and Essex councils hold no fault or reliability data at all. Northumberland leads with 97 per cent uptime across 487 chargers monitored hourly, and Surrey keeps downtime below 3 per cent on 411 sockets. The findings come as 52 per cent of surveyed drivers say they never use public charging, citing cost, availability and reliability concerns.
Why it matters: The data gap in four major counties and Hampshire's 25 per cent outage rate signal procurement and asset management failures that undermine public confidence in the charging network. For CPOs and local authorities tendering new installations, the contrast between best practice digital monitoring in Northumberland and the data black hole elsewhere highlights the operational standards now expected to win and retain contracts.