Noted on 20 Oct 2026

From tomorrow, you won't need planning permission in England to put an EV charger on the front of your house and run the cable across the pavement to your car. For the roughly third of households with no driveway, that's a positive change.

The council still ultimately has final approval. The cable has to cross in a channel the council has installed or approved, and you still need its permission to run a cable over the pavement at all. So the planning application has gone, but the council's yes or no hasn't, and neither has the fee. Redbridge, for example, asks £130 to apply, £185 for design and licence and a £500 bond, then £185 a year from the second year. Some councils charge nothing. It's the same pattern as car club bays: the same bit of kerb, priced differently from borough to borough.

Conservation areas are left out. That wasn't in what the government consulted on last winter, which only excluded listed buildings and scheduled monuments. It came in at the end, with the government saying it's "vital that we continue to protect the special character of our conservation areas". The Times reports that England's conservation areas are home to about 6.8 million people, around half of them without off-street parking. I'd guess that includes a lot of inner London's Victorian terraces, where the car is parked out the front. They can still apply for planning permission, as before.

There's also a limit of one charger per home, and a block of flats gets one between all of them.

The government estimates households will save about £1.7m a year in planning costs across England. Spread over the whole country that isn't much, which suggests the planning application was never the main obstacle.

A question for council EV and highways teams: with planning out of the way, what will actually decide whether you approve a channel and its cost?