Why Almost No UK Charging Network Meets the Law’s New 99 Percent Reliability Rule

A law now in force says every rapid public charging network in Britain must work 99 per cent of the time. In practice, fewer than one operator in twenty-five actually manages it. A 2025 survey of more than 200 UK charge point operator decision-makers found just 3.9 per cent currently meet the threshold, with the requirement enforceable from November 2024 onward and the first compliance reports due back in January 2026.

The gap between the legal promise and the driver’s actual experience runs even wider. Networks routinely claim uptime of 98 to 99 per cent, yet independent research covering over 100,000 charging sessions found the real first-time charging success rate sits at just 71 per cent. Nearly one in three attempts to plug in and start charging simply fails.

The Law Behind the 99 Per Cent Promise

The Public Charge Point Regulations 2023 came into force in November 2023, with a one-year lead-in period before the reliability rule started to bite. From November 2024 onward, every rapid charging network of 50kW and above has been legally required to hit 99 per cent average annual reliability, measured under the OCPI 2.2.1 protocol using status codes that flag a charger as Available, Charging or Reserved.

Crucially, the rules count a broken payment terminal as downtime too, not just a dead connector. Contactless payment has been mandatory on all new public chargers of 8kW and above from November 2024 onward, and if the card reader fails, that charger counts against the operator’s reliability score exactly as if the whole unit had gone dark. Operators can claim an exemption for vandalism, severe weather or grid failures, but only with documented evidence that the Office for Product Safety and Standards actually reviews.

The penalties on paper look serious. Failing the 99 per cent reliability requirement can cost an operator up to £10,000 per rapid network, missing the contactless payment mandate up to £10,000 per charge point, and obstructing enforcement or submitting a false compliance statement up to £250,000. Whether those figures are large enough to change behaviour at scale is an open question when the Monta survey shows barely one in twenty-five operators clearing the bar those penalties are meant to enforce.

Britain’s 99 per cent threshold is stricter than most comparable schemes elsewhere. The US federal NEVI programme requires a minimum uptime of 97 per cent for federally funded chargers, calculated on a rolling 12-month average per individual charging port rather than across an operator’s whole network. The European Union has no bloc-wide uptime mandate at all, leaving reliability requirements of 97 to 99 per cent to individual national and local tenders. The UK approach of averaging across an entire rapid network, and explicitly counting payment terminal failures as downtime, sets a higher bar on paper than either of those systems, which makes the 3.9 per cent compliance rate an even starker gap between ambition and delivery.

What Operators Report Versus What Drivers Actually Get

Technical uptime and a working charging session turn out to be two different things. ChargerHelp’s US analysis of over 2,400 chargers found that networks reporting 98.7 to 99.9 per cent uptime were delivering a first-time charge success rate of only 71 per cent, and more than a third of the failures happened on chargers that showed as fully operational on the network’s own dashboard. A charger can look available to every monitoring system in use and still leave a driver standing in a car park unable to get power into their battery.

Reliability gets worse the longer a charger has been installed. Year-over-year tracking shows first-time charge success rates falling from around 85 per cent at newly installed stations to below 70 per cent by their third year in service, a 15 point drop driven by hardware that was never built to keep pace with ongoing software updates, vehicle protocol changes and accumulating firmware limitations. A charger installed with a strong reliability record can quietly become one of the worst performers on a network within three years, with no obligation to tell drivers that has happened.

Why So Many Charging Sessions Fail

An analysis of more than 13 million charging sessions between 2018 and 2024 found that 81 per cent of all failures trace back to how the session was started, not to broken hardware. Failed authentication accounts for 75.7 per cent of that user-side total, usually caused by clunky charging apps, followed by cables not connected properly at 13.8 per cent and drivers abruptly ending sessions early at 9.5 per cent. Genuine technical failures make up only 19 per cent of the total, split between vehicle communication faults, connector locking issues and outright hardware faults.

Even when a fault is truly technical, getting it fixed can take a while. The best operators repair a broken rapid charger in under five hours; a typical repair on a DC fast charger can stretch to several weeks when the right parts are not on hand. The same industry survey found 45 per cent of operators name slow maintenance response times as their single biggest barrier to hitting the reliability target, while only 17 per cent can access key diagnostic data on demand and one in ten rarely or never receive a diagnostic update on a given charger at all.

What a Broken Charger Actually Costs a Driver

For a driver without a driveway or home charger, a failed public charging session is not a minor inconvenience, it can mean sitting in a car park working out whether the next nearest rapid charger has enough range left to reach it. Fleet operators describe cascading costs when a depot charger fails: missed routes, disrupted schedules, and the added expense of diverting a vehicle to backup public infrastructure at short notice, with many reporting they cannot fully recover a route disrupted by a charging failure within four hours.

The regulations were designed to close the gap between what an operator advertises and what a driver actually gets, using the threat of enforcement to force investment in maintenance. With compliance sitting at under 4 per cent more than a year after the rule took legal effect, that gap remains the reality for anyone relying on the public network rather than a driveway charger, a fact that sits awkwardly alongside government messaging encouraging drivers to switch to electric vehicles. For more on the wider cost pressures facing EV drivers this year, see our coverage of home EV charging costs rising up to £52 a year after July’s energy price cap increase and the 59p a unit summer charging discount now available at 600 UK sites.

How to Protect Yourself From an Unreliable Charger

Report a broken charger directly to the network operator that owns it, rather than only marking it as faulty on a mapping app. Operators are legally required to log and act on these reports under the 2023 regulations, and a direct report creates the paper trail that feeds into their compliance data, while a mapping app flag alone might never reach the operator responsible for fixing it.

Before a long trip, check a charger’s recent status history rather than trusting a single “available” tag, as a unit can look fine on the map while still failing on plug-in. Favour networks with a demonstrated long-term repair record over the cheapest tariff, and where possible plan a backup charger at every stop rather than relying on one location with no fallback. If an operator repeatedly fails to fix a reported fault, drivers can raise the pattern with the Office for Product Safety and Standards, the body responsible for enforcing the reliability rules and issuing penalties against networks that consistently miss the 99 per cent target.

Sources:

• Zest: EV Charging Reliability in 2026, What the Data Really Shows
• The Public Charge Point Regulations 2023
• GOV.UK: Public Charge Point Regulations 2023 guidance