£1.2m, two years and the quieter job behind motorway EV charging

National Highways has let a £1.2m, two-year motorway EV charging support contract, bringing in WSP and KPMG to help steer a programme that matters well beyond the chargepoint itself.

The expensive bit of motorway EV charging is not always the charger.

Quite often it is the work around it: the modelling, the programme management, the commercial choices and the awkward question of how a strategic road network built for fuel stops adapts to longer dwell times and heavier power demand.

In brief:

• National Highways has appointed WSP and KPMG to support its EV charging programme.
• The contract runs for two years and is valued at £1.2m.
• Both firms are expected to provide expertise alongside the strategic road authority.

Why the motorway EV charging contract matters

That is what sits behind National Highways’ latest consultancy spend. WSP and KPMG will support the authority’s EV charging programme under a contract worth £1.2m over two years. On paper, it is a professional services appointment. In practice, it is part of the less visible work that decides whether drivers find a charger in the right place, at the right scale and without the sort of bottlenecks that turn a service area into a queue with coffee.

There is a tendency to treat EV infrastructure as a hardware story. A number goes in a headline. So many chargers. So much funding. New bays. Nice render. The harder bit is fitting those decisions into a live motorway network where land, grid capacity, traffic demand and stopping patterns rarely line up neatly. National Highways does not run motorway service areas, but it does run England’s strategic road network, which means its planning role matters whenever charging becomes a question of access, resilience and future demand rather than a few extra parking spaces.

Consultancy support of this kind usually means the authority wants extra capacity or specialist advice, or both. That can cover business case work, demand forecasting, programme controls, market analysis and the sort of cross-discipline coordination that tends to sound dry until you are the one trying to fit high-powered charging into a site designed around pumps and sandwiches. The result is often invisible when it works well. Drivers just arrive, plug in and leave again. The roads sector knows better. Invisible is usually expensive and complicated.

It also points to a bigger shift in what road planning now has to account for. Service areas were built around fast refuelling and short stops. EV charging changes that rhythm. Vehicles may stay longer. Peaks can bunch around holiday traffic. Electrical capacity becomes a constraint rather than an afterthought. Layout matters more. So does the route-wide picture, because a charger that works perfectly in one location is less useful if the next reliable option is too far away for the vehicle mix using that corridor. We touched on the network effect in our piece on National Highways’ wider motorway EV charging push, and this contract sits squarely in that same planning problem.

The appointment of WSP and KPMG suggests National Highways wants a blend of technical and commercial advice. WSP is a major engineering and professional services firm with a large transport presence. KPMG brings consultancy and programme expertise from the commercial side. That pairing makes sense for a programme that is not only about where charging equipment goes, but how a national road authority helps shape delivery in a market involving operators, landholders, power constraints and policy pressure all at once.

For drivers, the immediate effect is not a new charger appearing next week. This is the groundwork. But groundwork is exactly what determines whether future provision feels thought through or patched in. Better planning can mean fewer dead-end upgrades, fewer badly sited bays and a stronger case for capacity where traffic demand is likely to rise fastest. For the sector, it is another sign that motorway EV charging has moved beyond pilot-stage symbolism into the more ordinary, more consequential business of programme delivery.

And that may be the most interesting part of the story. The roads industry is very good at spotting physical change: cones, gantries, compounds, closures, excavations. The shift to electric driving also depends on paperwork, modelling and boardroom decisions that never appear in a site photo. This £1.2m contract is one of those decisions. It is small compared with major civils spend, but it sits in the part of the process where the shape of the next few years gets decided.

For National Highways, the challenge is clear enough. England’s strategic road network needs charging that works for long-distance travel, not just local top-ups. That means thinking as much about network performance as individual sites. A two-year support contract will not solve that on its own. It does show that the authority is still building the machinery behind the build-out, and that the less glamorous part of motorway EV charging is now firmly a contract line in its own right.