The Electric Vehicle Homecharge Scheme (EVHS) is changing.

The Office for Zero Emissions (OZEV) Chargepoint Grants team has announced that from April 2022, the EVHS will be targeted at people in rented and leasehold accommodation and will be removed for private homeowners.

The existing scheme will run for another year until 31 March 2022, by which time OZEV expects the market to have reached sufficient maturity to operate effectively without Government intervention. After this date the scheme will focus solely on rental and leasehold properties (especially flats) where charging provision is currently more limited and potentially more challenging to secure. The objective of the reformed EVHS is to stimulate demand in the rental and leasehold sectors, and help ensure people living in this type of accommodation are able to access EV charging provision at home.

The transformation of EVHS will come in two parts:

1. A new digital platform will be launched for the revised EVHS in the second half of this year. It will permit people in rental and leasehold accommodation to continue to access EVHS funds and additionally allow non-resident landowners of such properties to apply on behalf of their tenants/leaseholders. An additional fund will also be made available to help with the cost of ducting for people in multi-unit occupancy buildings (such as apartment blocks).



2. The current EVHS support for owner occupied single unit housing will continue until 31 March 2022 after which date support will focus solely on rental and leasehold properties. OZEV is currently considering how to most effectively administer the existing EVHS scheme for its final year. It will either be digitised so that all new applications are run from it in the autumn, or the current platform will continue until the end of March 2022. Under both options installers will have over a year to prepare for the change. It is not yet clear how the funding process from April 2022 will be administered, but it is expected to become the responsibility of the tenant or leaseholder, rather than the installer.

The implications of this change are significant for the EV charging sector, with installers no longer having to seek OZEV compliance and a major financial incentive for homeowners to install charging points being removed. But it addresses a clear gap in EV charging provision and seeks engagement with a huge customer group that until now may have felt largely excluded from the electric vehicle community.

This change from April 1 2022 will indeed take the complexity out of the home EV charge point customer journey and will also mean installers will no longer need to go through OZEV’s accreditation process, said Jim Rugg, Head of Replenishh. On the plus side the industry can start to stand on its own two feet, but it remains to be seen how this will affect the quality of the installations being completed, if there is less incentive to be compliant with standards. The industry as a whole needs to work together now to be ready for this change in 2022, and Replenishh will look to play a key role, said Mr Rugg.

We will provide more updates in due course once further information is made available by OZEV.