Getting an EV charging network built in Hitchin

When you decide to stand for election you have a lot of ‘what if I’m elected’ thoughts, you think about the commitment on your time, the impact the work will have on your life, both professional and personal, but for me the biggest thing was lots of thoughts about what can I do to make a positive difference for Hitchin, the wider constituency and indeed the whole of North Hertfordshire.

Those thoughts and ideas were manifold and it is not possible to list them all here. However I would like to detail a couple of ones about the environment, because these are ideas which have now become reality (and there will be many more!). This blog post I hope will give a little insight into how things are done at Council level.

Part 2 – Electric cars!
Here is a problem. You live in a house without off street parking, how do you charge an electric car?

Trailing cables across the pavement is not an option, so essentially if your home only has on street parking then you are essentially prevented from running an electric car. This is an issue that I set out to solve as soon as I got elected.

In the first part of this blog I posted about the conventional process of getting things done at North Herts District Council, namely by tabling a motion on single use plastics and debating it through amendments until it passes. You can read that here: https://northhertssam.com/2019/03/07/getting-single-use-plastics-banned-at-nhdc/

But that is not the only way to get stuff done, there are other approaches and a good example of this was how I managed to get NHDC to instigate a major new Electric Car charging infrastructure project.

Electric cars, and indeed all ‘alternative-fuels’ have been a passion for me for many years. It is no secret that my background is in the motorsport industry, and I believe it plays a key role in developing greener propulsion technologies for production car use. To this end I have been active in promoting and endorsing the use of non fossil fuel vehicles in motor racing.

Sam at the wheel – Giving the Nissan Leaf its worldwide racing debut

One of the first things I did after being elected to the District Council was to start pushing for the roll out of a much better electric car charging network in Hitchin. I quickly discovered that there was over £100,000 set aside for ‘sustainable transport’ in Hitchin. These funds have been accrued under the ‘Section 106’ scheme – essentially money paid by property developers to mitigate the impact of their developments. The use of the funds is restricted to certain things, in this case an undefined thing called ‘sustainable transport.’

Around the same time a Lib Dem member in Hitchin got in touch with me, he wanted to buy an electric car, but could not do so as it was impossible for him to charge it at home. He like quite a few people in the area (including me) did not have off street parking. So there was no way to plug in his car without trailing cables across the pavement (assuming he could even park directly outside his own house).

However he highlighted a government scheme which would fund up to 75% of the cost of installing charging infrastructure, to solve this exact issue. So for example if all £100,000 of Hitchin’s S106 money was spent on charging this fund would top up that amount to £400,000.

Things however were not that simple. Spending the S106 money is far from straight forward, and indeed would likely need a motion to pass in Council. While I asked officers to look into that I raised the issue with Councillors from other parties, notably Cllr Mantle (Labour) and (Cllr Levett) Conservative. The latter over a couple of pints one evening.

Additionally I looked into what other Lib Dem Councillors around the UK had been doing, and also looked at solutions employed across Europe and in Japan.

Eventually the NHDC officers arranged a meeting to try to move things forward formally (I think to some extent to get me off their case!). They called on Liberal Democrat controlled Watford Borough Council to advise on progress they had made in installing on street charging points, and there had indeed been some progress.

But I think North Herts can do better, specifically in Hitchin. Watford, like most Councils, has relied on conventional charging posts. These are expensive, take up space on the pavement, and quite frankly I think that they are rather ugly. Also the focus of these posts is usually fast or rapid charging, in other words getting 100% charge in most EV’s in less than three hours.

While these units have their place but they alone are not sufficient for the future needs of Hitchin. They are also quite complex to get installed requiring planning permission and dedicated wiring, involving digging up streets and pavements. Expensive and time consuming.

Instead I looked to a solution I had seen used in Germany, and later found out is being trialled in London. Lamp post charging. What this does is utilise the pre-existing electricity infrastructure which for the majority of time is not used at all (street lights are switched off during the day, and in Hitchin after 0100hrs). No need to dig up the roads, no additional planning permission required, just a small adaptation to an existing structure.

The focus of these new chargers would be on slow charging, taking six or more hours to get 100% charge, meaning residents without off street parking could charge their cars over night, and at a very low cost.

During the meeting with the officers and other Councillors the initial feeling was that NHDC should wait and see how the project in Watford develops, get a report and then consider what to do in North Hertfordshire. It would cost around £10,000 to survey sites for new chargers, liaise with the County Council and UK Power Networks before we could get anything done.

This was not acceptable to me, waiting for Watford would be too slow, and we need to take action now. I also argued that while what Watford had achieved was great, we could be much more ambitious.

After some debate Cllr Levett agreed with me, and we jointly pushed to get £15,000 of funding into the 2019/20 NHDC Budget to start the project off. Once the initial ground work is done then more substantial work can be done to get charging points up and running. I hope this will happen by the end of 2019, and by the very latest have cars charging on the new points in 2020.

My vision is for every street where there are homes without off street parking to have lamp-posts with chargers installed meaning that we will be initially far over-served with chargers. But with the automotive industry forecasting that by 2030 80% of all new passenger vehicles will be either a plug in hybrid or a full EV, we need to be prepared for the future. We will also need to improve the reliability and number of fast and rapid chargers in the public car parks.

There are still questions which remain unanswered, can the energy network cope with the demand if all the chargers are in use, will parking bays be exclusively for EV use (if we are over-served with charging points then it should not be an issue), will it be free or chargeable, which exact system should we use? The work to answer these points has already begun and I hope in the coming months to update everyone on the details of the scheme.

But this was a very different way of getting Lib Dem policy enacted, rather than debates and motions in full Council, a few pints with a cabinet member and a cross party meeting got the scheme into the budget.

There will be a lot more news on this project in the coming days. Watch this space.

I’m quite pleased I managed to get the word ‘manifold’ into an article about electric cars!