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Funding confirmed for new EV regional grants

Date: 15 December 2010

Eastern England, the Midlands, Greater Manchester, Northern Ireland and Scotland have been confirmed as the five regions to benefit from a combined grant of more than £11.5m to develop 4597 new charging points for electric vehicles.

The largest individual grant goes to Greater Manchester, where £3.6m will be given towards the £9m cost of 305 charging points for workplace and public refuelling of electric vehicles, while £2.9m will go to the Midlands, where Birmingham, Coventry, Nottingham and Worcester will benefit from a total of 1713 charging points.

Eastern England will get £2.9m towards 1358 points across a broad stretch of the country stretching from Luton across to Norfolk and also including Stansted airport, Ipswich, Watford and parts of Essex, while a grant of £849,350 will go towards the planned 846 charging points across Northern Ireland, and Scotland's £1.5m grant will help pay for the 375 stations set to appear across what the Department for Transport describes as the "Edinburgh-Glasgow central belt.

The new announcement follows the first phase of grants that covered London, Milton Keynes and north-east England.

"Government action to support affordable vehicles and more local charging points means we are on the threshold of an exciting green revolution," said transport secretary Philip Hammond. "2011 could be remembered as the year the electric car took off."

The Government has also confirmed the first nine cars that will be eligible for its grant of up to £5000 towards low-CO2 car grants. Only three of the cars will actually be on sale when the grant is introduced on 1 January 2011, before being reviewed around 12 months later. The Mitsubishi i-MIEV, Smart Fortwo EV and Peugeot Ion are all scheduled to go on sale in January, three months ahead of the Nissan Leaf and Tata Vista, while the Citroen C-Zero is due in early 2011. The other three vehicles that have been confirmed as eligible for the subsidy are all range-extender hybrids that have a petrol engine to back-up the plug-in electric motor. The Chevrolet Volt, Toyota Prius Plug-in Hybrid and Vauxhall Ampera are all due in the first quarter of 2012, though there is a chance that the grant will have been removed by then.

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