Workplace EV charging, with grant funding in its final year

Workplace charging is the most forgiving commercial scenario there is, because dwell time is long. Staff arrive in the morning and leave in the evening, which gives you eight or nine hours to put energy into a car. That means 7kW AC sockets, occasionally 22kW where a three-phase supply is available and company cars need a mid-day top-up, will cover almost every requirement. Paying for DC in a staff car park is money spent on speed nobody uses.

The design work sits elsewhere. We survey your incoming supply, check spare capacity on the distribution board, and measure the cable route from the board to the bays you want to serve. Cable run length is usually the single biggest cost variable on a workplace job: twenty metres of surface-clipped SWA along a wall is cheap, and sixty metres across a car park that needs trenching, ducting and reinstatement is not.

Eight 7kW sockets drawing simultaneously is 56kW, which will exceed the spare headroom at most office buildings. Dynamic load management monitors your site's actual consumption in real time and shares whatever capacity is left across the connected vehicles, throttling back during the working day and opening up in the evening. Because staff cars sit still for hours, drivers rarely notice the difference, and you avoid a Distribution Network Operator supply upgrade that could add £10,000 to £100,000 and three to six months to the project.

Where headroom genuinely does not exist, we say so at survey rather than after the order. In those cases the options are a phased install, a smaller socket count, or a formal DNO application, and we will price all three so the decision is yours.

Most employers choose one of three positions: free charging as a benefit, charging at cost, or charging at a small margin. All three are straightforward to run through the back office, using RFID cards or an app to identify the driver. Free workplace charging for employees is not treated as a taxable benefit in kind for cars and vans, which is why it remains a popular retention perk, though you should confirm your own position with your accountant.

Access control matters more than people expect. Without it, an unrestricted socket in a shared business park becomes a public chargepoint at your expense. We configure whitelists, time windows and per-driver usage reporting at commissioning, and hand you the admin credentials rather than keeping them.

The Workplace Charging Scheme covers up to 75% of the purchase and installation cost including VAT, capped at £500 per socket, for up to 40 sockets per applicant across all sites. You must hold off-street parking, and the chargepoints must be installed by an OZEV-authorised installer, which we are. The scheme closes on 31 March 2027, and vouchers have a validity window, so the practical deadline for starting a survey is earlier than the headline date suggests.

Grants generally do not apply where chargepoints are already mandated by building regulations or a planning condition. If some of your company car drivers take their vehicles home, we can also fit chargers for drivers who take cars home, and you can add solar to cut charging costs.Checked September 2026