Northgate: don’t miss out on charging grants
Vehicle hire giant Northgate is urging businesses that have not already taken advantage of the Government Workplace Charging Scheme Grant funding to begin the application process now, or risk losing out on up to £14,000 of grants if the deadline is missed.
It is now under twelve months until the Workplace Charging Scheme grant provided by the Office of Zero Emission Vehicles (OZEV) ends on 31 March 2024.
However, Northgate and group in-house charging provider ChargedEV say they are expecting an industry backlog to develop on charger installations, in line with rapidly growing new EV sales and heavy oversubscription of the previous home charger grant that ended in April 2022.
Typically, the grant claim process usually takes around three months to complete. Northgate and ChargedEV are on hand to assist companies with the grant application process as part of its brand agnostic Drive to Zero initiative.
The OZEV Workplace Charging Scheme offers a voucher-based incentive to businesses looking to install on-site charging infrastructure for drivers capped at £350 per socket. This is restricted to 40 sockets per applicant across multiple sites and equates to lowering a company’s overall EV charger installation costs by up to 75 per cent.
The grant is available for businesses with designated off-street parking facilities and a power supply of up to 7kW available for each socket.
With Northgate and ChargedEV experiencing a 51 per cent increase in the number of socket installations during 2022, and demand showing no signs of slowing, a backlog of installations is expected to build up in the coming months.
“When the original OZEV funded grant scheme for home charging ended on 1 April 2022, we received a high number of installation booking requests that filled our available capacity in late 2021 and into 2022,” explained Mark Pymm, ChargedEV’s managing director.
“Our installation team of over 35 nationwide installers were at full capacity due to the grant requests.
Neil McCrossan, Northgate’s sales and marketing director, added: “We have experienced an increase in vehicle and charger applications during 2022 as a number of our fleet customers have begun their electrification process. If it continues to increase at this pace, we expect a bottleneck to form as the grant deadline approaches, which is why we are encouraging companies to start applying sooner rather than later.”
Northgate enables fleets to bundle electric LCV hire, charging infrastructure installation and maintenance, and vehicle charging payment cards into one single monthly contract. The firm can assist in various aspects of electrification, from selecting the right van for a fleet’s needs through to driver training.
