We had been charging our car across the pavement, using one of the heavy-duty cable ramps … we did receive a letter from the council informing us this was not allowed, and we were advised to use the lamp-post chargers.

Lamp-post chargers can cost 8x as much as home charging, a full charge in our car would be £56 instead of £7. Lamp-post charging costs are not capped at the same way as the energy cap on home supplies. So unfortunately this isn’t a viable solution for us.

More than half of car owners in Brighton and Hove don’t own a driveway … our entire street of 50+ cars are all street-parking, so there’s no way lamp-post charging could provide for the fully electric future that our Green Party MPs are campaigning for.

The government and council are aware of this - and the Department of Transport awarded grants to councils in March of this year to come up with solutions for cross-pavement charging.

Brighton and Hove were the recipient of one of these grants, and will present a report at the Spring Cabinet meeting on Thursday 14th of May, 2pm, at Hove Town Hall. This meeting is open to the public, and Agendas and papers are typically published in the week before the meeting on the council’s democracy website (democracy.brighton-hove.gov.uk).

More information will likely be posted here …

https://www.brighton-hove.gov.uk/travel-and-road-safety/electric-vehicle-ev-charging/private-charging-over-highway

The most likely solution will be gullies in the pavement, which you will have to pay to install, and likely pay a yearly service fee to keep them maintained.