Cross-Pavement Charging Grant: Who Qualifies for £500

If you live in a UK terrace, flat, or any property without a driveway or garage, you have probably been quietly excluded from the home-charging revolution. The Electric Vehicle Chargepoint Grant for Households with On-Street Parking was designed to fix that — and from 1 April 2026, it pays up to £500 (75% of the cost) towards a permanent cross-pavement solution and the chargepoint that goes with it. The catch: cable mats and trailing cables don't qualify, and your local highways authority gets the final say.

The grant covers 75% of the combined cost of buying and installing a chargepoint at your residential property, capped at £500. That cap rose from £350 to £500 for applications submitted on or after 1 April 2026, per GOV.UK's chargepoint grants guidance. The other four chargepoint grant schemes — for renters and flat owners with off-street parking, residential landlords, workplaces, and on-street commercial — run alongside it until the same 31 March 2027 sunset.

What the grant does not cover is the cost of the cross-pavement gully itself. That is a separate piece of work and a separate cost — typically £1,000–£2,000 fitted by a private supplier, sometimes subsidised down to a few hundred pounds where your council runs an LEVI-funded local scheme (see below). Without a permitted cross-pavement solution, you cannot draw down the grant — the two have to go together.

The grant is structured this way deliberately. Letting on-street drivers claim it for a wallbox alone would create exactly the safety problem GOV.UK's cross-pavement guidance warns about: trailing a cable across a public pavement is potentially a breach of Part IX of the Highways Act 1980. The grant therefore requires the permanent solution alongside the charger.

The official term is broad — any permanent installation that allows a charging cable to cross the pavement without sitting on top of it. In practice the UK market is dominated by two product categories.

Recessed cable channels (gullies). A slot cut flush into the pavement with a closing lid, sometimes called a gully. The cable is routed through the channel and the lid closes around it; when the cable is removed the lid sits flush with the pavement and there is no trip hazard. Charge Gully and Kerbo Charge are the two best-known UK products. Installation requires a small section of pavement to be lifted and the channel set into the surface — typically a half-day's work for two people once consent is in hand.

Other engineered solutions. GOV.UK's cross-pavement solutions guidance notes that two main solution types are currently on the market and subject to trial — gullies are by far the most common, but alternative engineered approaches exist. Whatever the form, the key requirement is permanence.

What does not qualify, per GOV.UK's grant guidance, is any temporary solution. Cable covers, rubber mats, doorway threshold strips, or trailing cables under any kind of cover all fail the test. The grant will be refused if the application proposes any of those, even if the local council would (in some cases) tolerate them in practice.

The decision to permit a cross-pavement installation rests with your local highways authority — typically the local council, sometimes the county council in two-tier areas. Councils are not obliged to approve, and they assess each application individually against criteria that GOV.UK's guidance leaves open to local interpretation.

Three considerations recur in council policy documents:

Pavement width and condition. Narrow pavements (under about 1.8 m of effective width) are routinely refused on accessibility grounds, since the gully and any future maintenance work would shrink usable footway below disability-access guidance. Older paving in poor condition is also a common refusal trigger, since the works would expose the council to wider repair liability.

Parking arrangements. A cross-pavement solution does not give the resident ownership of the parking space outside their home, and councils are generally unwilling to approve installations on sections of street with high parking turnover or where a permit zone is in place. The clearest approvals tend to come on residential terraces with consistent informal parking patterns.

Statutory underground apparatus. If the slot cuts across a known utility run — gas, water, BT — councils will often require the supplier to coordinate a Section 50 NRSWA licence and additional checks. That isn't a refusal, but it can extend timelines and costs.

If your application is refused, ask the council for the specific reason in writing. Many refusals are addressable — a slightly different mounting point on the property, a different gully length, or a coordinated install with a neighbour can sometimes flip the answer. Some councils also re-review automatically when their pavement-condition records are updated.

Several UK councils now run their own discounted gully schemes, funded by the Local Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (LEVI) programme, that stack on top of the national chargepoint grant. Where one of these is open in your area, the combined subsidy can bring the all-in cost (gully plus chargepoint plus install) down from roughly £2,500 to under £1,000.

Examples currently active or recently active:

This list is illustrative, not exhaustive — and the schemes are time-limited. Search 'cross-pavement gully' or 'EV charging gully' on your local council website before contacting a private supplier. If a scheme exists in your area, the council typically handles council consent automatically as part of the application — that's the single biggest practical advantage over going private.

A refused application is not the end of the line. Three avenues are worth pursuing.

Get the refusal reason in writing. Councils are required to give a reason. Many refusals are about a specific issue — pavement width at one chosen mounting point, an underground apparatus conflict — that can be designed around. Suppliers like Charge Gully and Kerbo Charge will revise drawings on request once they have the council's stated objection.

The grant guidance also clarifies that the grant cannot be drawn down without highways authority consent. So a refusal at council level effectively closes off the grant — making it worth investing time in a clean second application rather than abandoning the route entirely.

Engage the council's transport portfolio holder. Cross-pavement schemes are a councillor-level political topic in many authorities — councillors who have signed up to local LEVI bids tend to be supportive of individual applications too. A polite email summarising the application and asking for a sense-check before resubmitting can short-circuit a process that the highways team would otherwise drag out.

Check for an LEVI-funded scheme on the way. Some councils that currently refuse individual applications will be running formal schemes within 12 months — the LEVI funding pots are still being distributed. The DfT's LEVI announcements page is the authoritative source on which councils have been awarded what.

What is not a viable workaround is a temporary solution: cable mats, trip-cover strips, or running the cable under a doormat all fail both the grant test and (per GOV.UK guidance) potentially the legal test under the Highways Act 1980.