England scraps planning permission for pavement EV cables

On 21 October 2026 the planning rule for a home charger in England changed. A socket on a house, and a channel under the pavement to a car at the kerb, can be installed without a planning application, inside limits set by the Town and Country Planning (General Permitted Development) (England) (Amendment) (No. 2) Order 2026. The Department for Transport says dropping that application can take up to £300 off the installation. The channel still has to be authorised by the highway authority. Covered car parks were not part of this change.

Planning Portal's account of the amended Class D is that an electrical outlet may now sit anywhere in the grounds of a house or a block of flats, not only on an existing off-street parking space. The outlet and its casing must not exceed 0.2 cubic metres. The order, and Planning Portal, both put the top of that outlet no higher than 1.6 metres above the ground. A house or a block of flats may have only one outlet under the new wording, and the outlet cannot be on a listed building or a scheduled monument. A freestanding upstand, Planning Portal says, is limited to 1.6 metres in those residential grounds and to 2.7 metres in a non-domestic off-street car park.

Where a footway sits between the socket and the car, the order requires the cable to cross in an authorised cross-pavement solution, installed or approved by the highway authority, usually the council. A lead dropped across the pavement is not the permission that just took effect. Planning Portal says development can still be carried out under the previous rules until 20 October 2027.

Buses and Local Transport Minister Simon Lightwood said: "We're saving drivers up to £300 off the cost of installing home charging by cutting unnecessary red tape." The same Department for Transport release says the change opens home charging for as little as 2p a mile, and running-cost savings of up to £1,750. Those are the department's figures for drivers who can reach a domestic tariff. They are not a quote from one supplier.

Conservation areas do not get the new pavement right. Planning Portal's comparison still shows a planning application for a street charger or a pavement channel inside a conservation area, while a charger on a driveway in that same area stays within the older allowance. Highways News reported that the exclusion was written into the instrument made on 25 September 2026, and that it takes in around 10,000 conservation areas. A household in one of those areas is where it was in September.

Vicky Edmonds, chief executive of EVA England, said: "This might look like a small planning change, but for someone without a driveway, it could make the difference between being able to afford an electric car and ruling one out altogether." She said the group's research found that 60 percent of petrol and diesel drivers without off-street parking would never consider an electric car, and that councils and landlords still have to make the hardware reachable. The order removes an application when the conditions are met. It does not order a council to install a channel.

Part S of the building regulations has, since 2021, required charge points in most new buildings and major renovations in England. It does not require them in enclosed or open-sided car parks. Those sites have to provide cable routes instead. The Department for Transport and the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government opened a consultation on 21 October, closing at 11:59pm on 16 December 2026, on whether covered car parks should have to install the charge points themselves, and on whether the £3,600 average cap on connection cost still belongs where it was set. Once that cap is passed, the remaining spaces drop back to cable routes. The consultation asks if the cap should be raised, including with CPI. It does not propose a new number.

Officials say the 2021 exemption left time to study fire risk. The consultation points to research that battery cars catch fire less often than petrol and diesel cars, and to a study that did not find charging itself made a garage fire more likely. It also says more research is being commissioned, and that the Building Safety Regulator's advice still stands. A builder this week follows the cable-route rule, not the proposal.

A second consultation, with the same deadline, asks how a tenant or a leaseholder gets a charger when someone else controls the building. The department says ministers are looking at requirements that would make a refusal harder to sustain. That is a question on a form. It is not a duty on a landlord today.

The split a driver can use is the split in the paperwork. The socket, the pavement channel and the multi-storey car park are three regimes. Only the first two changed on 21 October, only in England, and not on a listed building or in a conservation area. People who own or manage a covered car park have until 16 December to answer the questions that would change the third.