Fraser Crichton, corporate fleet manager at Dundee City Council and winner of the Fleet Initiative Superstar title at the 2026 Great British Fleet Awards, on why the contract
Fraser Crichton, corporate fleet manager at Dundee City Council and winner of the Fleet Initiative Superstar title at the 2026 Great British Fleet Awards, on why the contract length question is the most under-examined issue in UK EV infrastructure. And what Dundee’s experience of managing one of the UK’s most electrified local authority fleets has taught him about getting it right.
There are now over 119,000 public EV chargers installed across the UK. The network grew by 19% in 2025. By most measures, Britain’s infrastructure is expanding at pace. So why does it still feel, to so many drivers and fleet operators, like the system isn’t working?
The answer has less to do with the number of chargers and more to do with the contracts behind them. We’ve been so focused on how many chargers get installed that we’ve rarely asked the question that actually determines whether they’ll still be working, maintained and upgraded in five or 10 years’ time: how long is the commitment?
At Dundee City Council, we’ve sought to answer that question with a 20-year partnership. It’s the longest infrastructure commitment of its kind that we’re aware of in the UK. And having spent the last 15 years building Dundee’s EV infrastructure from scratch, I’m convinced that the contract length is the most under-examined issue in the entire UK charging landscape.
Why Scotland’s transition is revealing
Scotland is a useful case study because we’re going through something right now that the rest of the UK will face eventually. Since 2011, the Scottish government invested over £65m in building the ChargePlace Scotland public charging network. It worked: Scotland now has more public chargers per capita than anywhere in the UK outside London. But the publicly funded model was always intended to be temporary, and Transport Scotland is now winding it down.
That means every Scottish local authority is being asked to find a private partner to take over the operation and maintenance of its charging infrastructure. The councils that were relying on ChargePlace Scotland are now, in many cases for the first time, having to think about what kind of contract they actually want.
Different councils are making different choices. Highland, Aberdeen City, Aberdeenshire and Moray have entered a partnership with one operator. Edinburgh has chosen another. Dundee chose to sign a 20-year deal with Evolt Charging, the company we’ve been working with since 2011. We completed the migration away from ChargePlace Scotland in two and a half weeks with zero downtime for drivers.
I’m not going to say other councils are wrong. Every area has different needs and different circumstances. But I do think the question of contract length deserves much more scrutiny than it’s getting because it determines almost everything that follows.
Think about it from the operator’s perspective. If you’re awarded a five-year contract to manage a council’s charging network, what are you going to invest? You’ll maintain what’s there. You might upgrade a few units if the contract requires it. But you’re not going to put money into solar generation, battery storage or new hub construction if you don’t know whether you’ll still be operating the network in year six.
A 20-year commitment changes that dynamic entirely. In Dundee, the long-term partnership has enabled the kind of infrastructure investment that simply wouldn’t be viable on a shorter contract.
Our Clepington Road hub integrates 600kW-peak of solar generation, 720kWh of second-life battery storage using repurposed EV batteries, and rainwater harvesting. It was the first installation of its kind in the world. None of that would exist if we’d been working on a rolling five-year agreement.
We’re now planning a new rapid charging hub for the north of the city: eight ultra-rapid chargers, solar canopies and battery storage. And we’re exploring whether surplus renewable energy from our hubs can be exported back into the national grid, turning infrastructure that was built as a cost into something that generates revenue for the city. These are possibilities that only open up when both parties know they’ll be working together long enough to see them through.
Dundee now operates 232 electric vehicles; over a third of our fleet of 670. That includes everything from pool cars to refuse collection vehicles. We have a target of becoming fully electric by 2035. Achieving that depends entirely on having charging infrastructure we can rely on for the long term.
A refuse collection vehicle stays on our fleet for 10-12 years. An electric van might be with us for seven or eight. When I’m making the decision to replace a diesel vehicle with an electric one, I need to know that the depot charging will be there – maintained and upgraded – for the entire life of that vehicle. A short-term infrastructure contract introduces risk into every single fleet replacement decision.
The 20-year contract also gives us cost predictability through a bi-yearly tariff review. I can’t forecast the exact cost of charging in 2032, but I know the mechanism by which it will be reviewed, and I know both parties will be at the table. For fleet budgeting, that kind of structured visibility is far more useful than the uncertainty of a contract that could end or be renegotiated on terms I can’t predict.
We’re not inventing something new. Scandinavian countries have been building EV charging networks on long-term public-private partnerships for years. Germany’s Deutschlandnetz initiative uses a similar model, awarding contracts for high-powered charging infrastructure to private operators with the long-term certainty that makes genuine investment viable.
The UK is one of the few major EV markets still largely relying on short-term contracts for public charging infrastructure. Dundee’s approach is the closest thing we have to the European model, and I think the rest of the country will eventually arrive at the same conclusion.
I’ve been working on Dundee’s EV infrastructure since 2011. Over that time, we’ve trialled every type of charger, made plenty of mistakes and learned from every one of them. The single most important lesson is this – the technology changes, the vehicles change, the tariffs change. The thing that holds everything together is commitment.
When councils are deciding how to replace ChargePlace Scotland, or how to set up their charging infrastructure for the first time, the temptation will be to sign the shortest contract that ticks the procurement box. I’d urge them to ask a different question: will this contract still be working for us when the vehicles we’re buying today reach the end of their lives? If the answer is no, the contract isn’t long enough.
Dundee’s network now supports 373 vehicles charging simultaneously, with all revenue reinvested into the estate. We didn’t get here by finding the cheapest five-year deal. We got here by building a partnership that was long enough to learn, invest, and improve. Twenty years isn’t a leap of faith. It’s the minimum commitment that takes EV infrastructure seriously.
