£65M Fuels the UK’s Push to Charge EVs Where People Live

Announced in January 2025, £65M from the National Wealth Fund and Aviva backs Connected Kerb’s on-street charging push

19 Jan 2026

A quiet change is taking place in Britain’s electric-vehicle race. It is not happening on motorways or at glittering ultra-fast hubs, but on residential streets. In January 2025 Connected Kerb, an operator focused on on-street charging, raised £65m from the government’s National Wealth Fund and Aviva Investors. The deal suggests that investors now see the kerb, rather than the car park, as the critical battleground.

For years the charging industry has chased speed. Rapid and ultra-rapid chargers multiplied along trunk roads, reassuring drivers that long journeys were possible. Yet for most motorists the bigger problem has been more mundane. Millions of households lack driveways or private parking. Without a reliable place to charge overnight, owning an electric car is awkward, whatever its range.

That gap has slowed adoption more than any shortage of fast chargers. Connected Kerb’s strategy is to address it directly by installing chargers where cars already sit for hours, outside homes and on ordinary streets. By the end of 2024 it had installed about 9,000 charge points. It plans to add more than 30,000 by 2028 and has spoken of a longer-term ambition of roughly 40,000 sockets.

The sums involved are modest compared with the cost of building power stations or railways. The complexity lies elsewhere. On-street charging requires deals with councils, careful street design and years of maintenance across thousands of sites. That operational grind once scared investors away. Increasingly it is the attraction. Firms that master it may build networks that are hard to copy and steady to run.

The identity of the backers matters as much as the money. The National Wealth Fund’s involvement implies that ministers now see residential charging as essential infrastructure, not just a commercial add-on. Aviva Investors’ participation sends a similar signal from the private sector: EV charging is maturing into a long-term, infrastructure-style asset.

Motorway chargers will still matter for long trips. But mass adoption depends on whether drivers can plug in near home without fuss. With public capital committed and private money following, the kerb is no longer the neglected edge of Britain’s charging network. It is becoming the centre of it.