LEVI: where the money is going in UK on-street charging
Date Published
The Local Electric Vehicle Infrastructure fund, known as LEVI, is the single biggest force in UK on-street charging procurement right now. It exists to help councils deliver charging for the millions of households without off-street parking, and it is reshaping how local authorities buy.
The shape of the fund
LEVI puts around £380 million of capital and capability funding into the hands of local authorities in England, to plan and deliver mostly low-power, on-street charging. Councils do not spend it like a normal supply contract. Most are running long concessions, often 10 to 15 years, in which an operator funds, installs and runs the network and shares revenue back.
That concession model is why the headline contract values look so large. A figure like £167 million for a regional programme is the operator's projected revenue over the life of the deal, not council cash going out of the door. Reading those numbers correctly matters, and it is something we are careful about.
Recent procurements show the model in practice: Central Bedfordshire's lamppost programme and another LEVI-funded charge-point procurement are live, concession-led, on-street deployments.
What it means if you bid
For operators, LEVI concessions are the largest prizes on the board, and they reward integrated bids that bring hardware, civils, software, energy and long-term operations under one roof. For installers and electrical contractors, the work sits in the supply chain beneath the concessionaire, which is exactly the kind of opportunity a keyword search for an EV tender tends to miss.
For councils, the questions are about benchmarking. What did comparable authorities pay, how did they structure the concession, and which operators have delivered well elsewhere? That is what the award and organisation data on EVTenders is for.
Concessions, frameworks or direct supply? How UK local authorities are buying EV charging, and what each model means for bidders.
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