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Streets in West London are set for a visible change over the next three years as Hillingdon Council plans to roll out more than 1,500 new electric vehicle (EV) charging stations across the borough. Despite this, the council plans to purchase a new fleet of diesel vehicles due to infrastructure problems concerning a lack of EV charging stations. Additionally, in an effort to save money, the council will begin tracking its drivers.
Hillingdon Council has partnered with Brent, Ealing, Hammersmith & Fulham, Haringey and Harrow to secure a £7.5 million grant from the government’s Local Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Fund (LEVI). Hillingdon’s share equates to £1.25 million.
The council will use this funding to procure an external operator to install and manage up to 1,673 new EV charging points across the borough over a minimum period of three years. The council hopes it can prevent complaints that charging points become “street clutter”.
It is doing this by attaching a majority of the standard overnight chargers to existing lampposts wherever possible. Council documents indicate that this rollout is essential to meet the authority’s commitment to carbon reduction, cleaner air and rising demand.
Despite having green ambitions for its residents, the council is struggling to meet those same targets for its own operations. According to documents, Hillingdon Council is to purchase new diesel vehicles rather than electric alternatives.
The council has 26 frontline service vehicles that are in their 11th year of operation. As a result they are suffering from reliability issues and costing the council daily ULEZ fees. The local authority plans to replace the ageing vehicles with 32 new diesel vehicles. A council report explicitly blames this on infrastructure issues.
For example, the current lack of charging facilities and severe grid capacity limits at the council’s own facilities means it is not currently viable to use electric vehicles for frontline service. The same council report warns that “major investment will be needed in electrical power supply to the Harlington Road depot to support future growth in the electrical vehicle fleet”.
Council officers have also decided to install tracking devices across its entire vehicle fleet by the end of this year. This comes as driver accident damage is currently costing Hillingdon taxpayers more than £800,000 per year, with roughly 80 per cent of these incidents occurring in waste and street cleaning operations.
To combat this, the council enforced trackers will monitor habits such as “harsh braking, fast cornering, excessive acceleration [and] speeding.” This data will be used to create a score for each driver.
The score will then be used in “regular discussions with poor performing individuals” in hopes to improve staff driving habits. Additionally, because the fleet burns through £1 million in fuel annually, the council hopes that forcing drivers to become more efficient will also reduce fuel consumption and cost in turn.
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