The number that didn't add up
EVChargeSpot started out claiming around 38,000 UK charge points. That felt roughly right based on what the industry was saying, so we left it there. Then we started digging into the actual data behind that number and it immediately became clear that it was wrong. Not slightly wrong. Significantly wrong.
The problem wasn't that we were missing data. All the operator feeds were coming in. Every major network was represented. The charge point locations were in the database. The issue was that thousands of those records had no value in the number of charge points field. Null. Nothing. So our total was counting locations, not charge points, and calling it good.
Where the nulls were coming from
Different operators publish their data in different ways, through different feeds, with different levels of completeness. Some send beautifully structured records with everything you'd want. Others send a location, a postcode, and not much else. The number of charge points at that location (arguably the most useful single piece of information) is often just absent.
Ubitricity is the biggest example. They are the largest charging operator in the UK, with over 13,000 lamppost chargers installed across London and other cities. Every single one of those records had a null point count. They're lamppost chargers. One charger per lamppost. The data just wasn't there to say so.
The same pattern showed up across a dozen other operators. BP Pulse, Shell Recharge, ChargePlace Scotland, GeniePoint. All had significant numbers of locations with no point count at all. Operators who had been acquired or rebranded had records that were half one thing and half another. One major London network had been bought by a competitor two months earlier and was still showing under the old name with incomplete data throughout.
After cleaning the data, our charge point total went from 38,000 to just over 80,000. That is not a rounding error. That is a completely different picture of the UK charging landscape.
What we actually did
We went through the data operator by operator. For networks where enough records had valid point counts, we used those to fill the gaps with realistic averages. For lamppost charger networks where the answer is obviously one per location, we set it to one. For operators who had been acquired we updated the names. For records that were clearly junk (unknown addresses, no postcode, no coordinates) we left them alone rather than guess.
We are not going to walk through every step in detail. Partly because it took a while and this is a blog post, not a technical manual. Partly because the specifics of how you clean a dataset are genuinely proprietary. But the short version is: we checked everything, we fixed what we could verify, and we did not invent numbers.
Why this shouldn't be anyone's job
Here is the thing that actually bothers me about all of this. The Public Charge Point Regulations 2023 exist specifically to prevent this. Operators of public charge points in the UK are legally required to publish their data as open data. Location, connector type, speed, availability, number of charge points. It's all supposed to be there, in a standard format, freely accessible.
In practice, compliance is patchy. The format isn't truly standardised across all operators. Fields that are supposed to be mandatory are routinely blank. Some operators publish through aggregators. Some publish direct. Some publish through feeds that haven't been updated since the regulation came into force. And nobody with real enforcement power is sitting there checking that the data is actually correct before it goes out.
So every organisation that wants to work with UK charging data ends up doing some version of what we did. Building their own cleaning pipeline. Making their own decisions about how to handle nulls and inconsistencies. Arriving at their own number that is defensible but not necessarily the same as anyone else's number. Which is how you get a situation where the industry figure for total UK charge points varies by tens of thousands depending on who you ask and how they counted.
This is not a hard problem to solve. A genuinely standardised data format, real validation before publication, and a single authoritative source that operators are required to publish to would fix most of it. The infrastructure for something like that already exists in other sectors. It just hasn't been applied here, because the political will to enforce data quality in EV charging isn't there yet.
What it means for EVChargeSpot
Our number is now 80,262 charge points across 38,936 locations. That's the most accurate figure we have ever published and it's based on cleaned, verified data from operator feeds rather than a rough count of location records.
It will change again. Operators update their feeds. Networks get acquired. New chargers go in. Some of the data we fixed today will go stale tomorrow. That's just how this works. But at least now the number means what it's supposed to mean.
If you run a charging network and your data isn't right in our system, get in touch. We would rather fix it than leave it broken.