The Public Charge Point Regulations 2023 changed what it means to operate public charging in the UK: driver experience standards that were once marketing promises became legal obligations with enforcement behind them. If you operate — or are tendering to operate — public charge points, the regulations shape your platform requirements as much as your hardware choices.
Here's a plain-English tour of the main obligations and, since we're a software company, what each one demands from your charging platform.
(The usual caveat: this is an operator's orientation, not legal advice. The regulations themselves and official government guidance are the authority — check them, and take advice on your specific situation.)
The 99% reliability requirement
The headline obligation: rapid charge points (50 kW and above) must achieve 99% average annual reliability, measured across an operator's rapid network, with reliability reported annually.
Two things make this harder than it sounds. First, 99% across a year is a small budget — roughly 3.7 days of downtime per charger per year, averaged, which means a few bad chargers drag the whole figure. Second, you have to evidence it, which means your definition of "working" needs to survive scrutiny.
What it means for your platform: connector-level availability tracking with a defensible methodology — not "the charger was online" but "the charger could deliver a charge". We've written about why those are different questions; the regulatory version of that argument is that outcome-based measurement is the only kind that stands up when the reported number is challenged. Your platform should produce the reliability report, with its workings, rather than leaving it to a spreadsheet the week before the deadline.
Contactless payment
New public rapid charge points (8 kW and above) must offer contactless payment — drivers can't be required to download an app or hold a membership to charge.
What it means for your platform: payment terminals become part of charger health. A charger that charges perfectly but can't take payment is, for a walk-up driver, broken — so terminal status belongs in your monitoring and in your reliability thinking, not in a separate silo owned by the payment provider.
Price transparency
Pricing must be displayed clearly in pence per kilowatt-hour — visible before the session starts, whether on the unit or through an accessible digital means.
What it means for your platform: tariff management with an audit trail. When the price shown at the charger, the price in the app and the price on the invoice come from one tariff source, transparency is automatic; when they're maintained in three places, discrepancies are a matter of time — and a compliance complaint waiting to happen.
Open data
Operators must make charge point reference and availability data openly available, so that mapping services and journey planners can show drivers accurate, current information.
What it means for your platform: live status has to flow outward through open interfaces — typically OCPI feeds into the ecosystem's data aggregators — accurately and continuously. Stale availability data isn't just a compliance question; every driver who arrives at an "available" charger that's occupied or dead is a trust withdrawal from the whole industry.
The 24/7 helpline
Operators must provide a free, 24-hour staffed telephone helpline for drivers at the charge point.
What it means for your platform: the helpline's effectiveness is entirely a function of what the agent can see and do. An agent who can pull up the charger, see live status and session state, and safely restart or unlock remotely resolves calls in minutes; an agent with a script and no visibility escalates everything to an engineer visit. Guided, permission-scoped remote controls for support teams — restart yes, tariff edits no — are what make a helpline more than a complaints inbox. (This is exactly what role-based access in the Portal exists for.)
Reading the regulations as a product spec
Put the obligations side by side and a pattern appears: each one is an evidence requirement wearing an operational costume. Reliability wants measurement you can defend. Transparency wants a single tariff truth. Open data wants live state you'd stake your name on. The helpline wants controlled, audited intervention.
That's why we'd argue the regulations quietly raised the bar for charging platforms more than for chargers. Hardware was rarely the reason networks failed drivers; operational blindness was. The platforms that make compliance a by-product of normal operation — rather than an annual reporting scramble — are the ones that turn regulation from cost into competitive evidence.
For operators bidding into public tenders, that evidence compounds: authorities increasingly ask not just "will you comply?" but "show us how" — and a live dashboard beats a promise every time. (Our 12 vendor questions piece looks at this from the evaluator's chair.)
AmpNexus tracks connector-level reliability, single-source tariffs and audited support controls across mixed fleets — see the platform or talk to us about compliance reporting.