LEVI: where the money is going in UK on-street charging

The Local Electric Vehicle Infrastructure fund, known as LEVI, is the single biggest force in UK on-street charging procurement right now. It exists to help councils deliver charging for the millions of households without off-street parking, and it is reshaping how local authorities buy.

The shape of the fund

LEVI puts around £380 million of capital and capability funding into the hands of local authorities in England, to plan and deliver mostly low-power, on-street charging. Councils do not spend it like a normal supply contract. Most are running long concessions, often 10 to 15 years, in which an operator funds, installs and runs the network and shares revenue back.

That concession model is why the headline contract values look so large. A figure like £167 million for a regional programme is the operator's projected revenue over the life of the deal, not council cash going out of the door. Reading those numbers correctly matters, and it is something we are careful about.

Where the money is actually going

The allocations are public, and we track them authority by authority. The per-authority capital allocations we hold total £343 million across 80 English authorities and combined authorities. The single biggest share sits with London: the capital's boroughs hold a joint allocation of £35.7 million, currently marked as under review on the latest government data. After London, the money concentrates in the combined authorities and the largest counties:

• Greater Manchester Combined Authority: £16.2 million
• North East Combined Authority: £15.8 million
• West Midlands Combined Authority: £14.5 million
• West Yorkshire Combined Authority: £14.3 million
• Kent: £12.1 million, the largest county allocation, with Lancashire (£10.1 million), Essex (£8.4 million), Devon (£7.1 million) and Hampshire (£6.7 million) close behind

Two things follow from that map. First, the on-street procurement pipelines of the next few years will be concentrated where these allocations sit, so if you are planning a bid pipeline, this is the geography to plan around. Second, an allocation is a programme budget, not a tender value: what actually reaches the market is a concession or contract shaped by each authority, which is why the £343 million above and the concession headlines are different kinds of number.

The model in practice

Live procurements show how allocations turn into contracts. Central Bedfordshire's LEVI Tender 1 is a lamppost-led, on-street deployment, and the West of England's WESTCharge concession is in market now, with bids due 30 March 2027.

What it means if you bid

For operators, LEVI concessions are the largest prizes on the board, and they reward integrated bids that bring hardware, civils, software, energy and long-term operations under one roof. For installers and electrical contractors, the work sits in the supply chain beneath the concessionaire, which is exactly the kind of opportunity a keyword search for an EV tender tends to miss.

For councils, the questions are about benchmarking. What did comparable authorities pay, how did they structure the concession, and which operators have delivered well elsewhere? That is what the award and organisation data on EVTenders is for.

See LEVI activity across the UK