IN Brief:
- Believ has been selected to deliver Hampshire County Council’s public EV charging programme.
- The rollout is expected to support 17,180 public chargers through LEVI funding and private investment.
- The programme will require coordinated civils, electrical, highways, accessibility, and maintenance delivery.
Believ has been selected by Hampshire County Council to deliver a major public electric vehicle charging programme, with 17,180 public charge points planned across the county.
The programme is backed by £6.6m of Local Electric Vehicle Infrastructure funding, with Believ expected to provide up to £90m of private investment. The majority of chargers will be 22kW sockets designed to support residential, long-stay, and overnight charging, with more than 800 rapid chargers rated at 50kW and above also planned.
Believ will be responsible for design, installation, operation, and long-term maintenance. Installations are due to begin later this year, with around 500 charge points expected in the first year of delivery.
Hampshire’s rollout has been designed to improve access for residents without private driveways or off-street parking. County-level deployment will require a mix of on-street, car park, destination, and rapid charging locations, each with different groundworks, power, traffic, parking, accessibility, and maintenance requirements.
Public EV charging programmes at this scale are now becoming infrastructure projects in their own right. Local authorities are no longer procuring isolated charger installations; they are assembling long-term networks that depend on site surveys, grid capacity, civils coordination, reinstatement, bay design, signage, asset management, and payment systems operating reliably together.
On-street installations create particular delivery challenges. Chargers must fit into existing footways, parking layouts, lighting columns, drainage routes, street furniture, utilities, trees, and pedestrian desire lines. Each location needs enough electrical capacity, safe cable routes, accessible positioning, and a maintainable asset layout, without creating obstructions or undermining the wider streetscape.
Accessibility will be a major test for the programme. Hampshire’s rollout is expected to align with PAS 1899 principles wherever possible, placing focus on bay dimensions, reach ranges, terminal access, cable management, lighting, kerb heights, and safe movement around charging equipment. Those requirements can be difficult to meet on older streets where available space is already limited.
The funding model also reflects a shift in local authority infrastructure procurement. By combining public LEVI support with private capital, councils can accelerate deployment while transferring operation and maintenance responsibilities to specialist charge point operators. That model can reduce direct pressure on local authority budgets, but it also places long-term emphasis on uptime, user experience, transparent data, and contract performance.
For the construction and highways supply chain, the work will generate demand across electrical installation, civils, surfacing, traffic management, surveying, design, connections, and maintenance. Repetition will be essential, but the programme will still need enough flexibility to respond to local site conditions across Hampshire’s urban centres, suburbs, market towns, and rural communities.
The first year of deployment will give an early indication of how quickly the county can convert funding, private investment, and site planning into working public infrastructure. As EV adoption increases, the pressure will move from headline charger numbers to reliability, coverage, accessibility, and the ability to keep installations functioning over the long term.
