No driveway shouldn’t mean paying more to charge your car.
We’re residents of Hounslow without off-street parking, campaigning for the borough to permit cross-pavement charging gullies — the small, kerb-to-door channels that let an EV cable run safely under the pavement instead of trailing across it.
Hounslow wants residents to spend £50–£60 charging their cars at unreliable commercial charge points when they could be charging at home for £5–£6.
A full home charge overnight, on a standard domestic electricity tariff, costs a Hounslow resident somewhere around £5 to £6. The only options open to anyone without a driveway are public charge points — rapid, ultra-rapid, or on-street lamp-post chargers — and every one of them costs more: a rapid or ultra-rapid unit typically runs £50 to £60 for the same charge, and even a slower lamp-post charger costs several times the home rate.
That gap isn’t a quirk of the market. It’s the direct result of current council policy, which leaves residents without off-street parking no legal way to run a charging cable from their own home to their own car. Every charge they can’t do at home is a charge they’re forced to pay a premium for — at exactly the moment household budgets are under the most strain from the cost of living.
The council currently declines to permit cross-pavement charging gullies, citing concerns about public liability and trip hazards. Those are reasonable questions to ask — but they are not unanswered ones. Other UK councils have already worked through them, and until Hounslow catches up, its own residents are the ones paying the difference, charge after charge.
It’s also holding back the wider switch away from fossil fuels.
Every household put off going electric because there’s nowhere affordable or convenient to charge is a household staying on petrol or diesel for longer. Multiply that across every terraced street in Hounslow without a driveway, and the policy gap isn’t just a local cost — it’s a drag on the borough’s, and the country’s, progress toward cleaner transport, prolonging the environmental damage the switch to EVs is meant to reduce.
Hounslow's objections have already been resolved — elsewhere.
We're not asking the council to take a risk nobody else has taken. Other authorities have approved cross-pavement gully schemes and published exactly how they addressed liability and safety.
BCP Council
Bournemouth, Christchurch & Poole Council's Cabinet approved a cross-pavement charging scheme, setting out how liability and maintenance are handled in practice.
Stoke-on-Trent
Stoke-on-Trent City Council runs a comparable scheme, showing this isn't a one-off exception but a repeatable, adoptable approach.
BSI-approved gullies
British Standard-approved gully products exist specifically to address the trip-hazard and durability concerns councils raise — this is a solved engineering problem, not an open one.
A clear, funded path to cross-pavement charging in Hounslow.
Our aim, as set out in our constitution, is simple: promote the development of EV charging infrastructure for residents across the borough. In practice, that means:
Adopt a gully-based charging policy
Permit BSI-approved cross-pavement charging channels, following the precedent already set by BCP and Stoke-on-Trent.
Apply for LEVI Fund support
Draw on the Department for Transport's Local Electric Vehicle Infrastructure funding that neighbouring boroughs are already using.
Publish a resident application process
A clear, published route for a resident to apply for and install a permitted charging gully outside their own home.
Pilot in Chiswick Riverside
Trial the policy on a small number of streets before wider rollout, so any practical issues are found early.
Join the association
Membership is free and open to any Hounslow resident who supports the aim. Joining adds your voice — the more members we have, the stronger our case to the council.
It takes about two minutes: we introduce the campaign, hand you a ready-written letter to send to your ward councillors, and sign you up at the end.
Join us — it’s freeNo payment and no account needed. No marketing, and we never sell or share your details.
Tell the council directly
A short letter to your ward councillors creates a direct, on-record request to permit cross-pavement charging. We've written it for you — it takes about two minutes to send.
Write to your councillorsContact your ward councillors
A message from a resident carries real weight with their own ward councillors — find yours, and every other councillor in the borough, in our full directory.
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