The London Office of Technology and Innovation (LOTI) created a unified dashboard for EV charge point data, enabling secure, standardised sharing and analysis across London boroughs. This collaboration improved strategic planning and resource allocation for EV infrastructure, overcoming commercial and technical challenges to deliver measurable benefits for local authorities.
Background
To support London boroughs in leveraging smart city technologies and collaborating through data, the London Office of Technology and Innovation (LOTI) developed a unified view of the city’s Electric Vehicle (EV) charge point network and its usage. Previously fragmented, this initiative enables boroughs to better understand infrastructure across London.
The dashboard is designed to help London borough highway and transport officers make data informed decisions about the types and locations of charge points, supporting both operational and strategic planning.
LOTI acts as a facilitator, working closely with the Greater London Authority (GLA) and London boroughs to standardise and streamline EV charge point data.
Approach to data
The GLA City Intelligence Unit provides a centralised data processing hub. Data is ingested directly from EV charge point operators with data-sharing requirements embedded in contracts where possible. Operators submit data quarterly, including charge point locations and usage statistics.
The project team then aggregates, cleans and aligns the data across quarters, enabling a dashboard that offers a historical view of utilisation per charge point. Boroughs have direct access to the dashboard and can use a suite of visual analytics tools. A dedicated group meets to co-develop new features and ensure the dashboard evolves with user needs.
Impact
The dashboard is widely used by London boroughs for strategic planning, funding bids and internal reporting. It helps local authorities understand EV coverage and usage patterns at a granular level.
The dashboard in action
“At Lambeth Council, we’ve used the dashboard to look at areas in the borough that host chargers with the highest/lowest utilisation. This has informed our delivery, allowing us to either focus delivery in areas with high utilisation rates or guide residents to their local charger when requests come in from areas with low utilisation."
Key dashboard features include:
- visualising residential areas within a one, three or five minute walk of a charge point
- mapping concentrations of private hire and taxi vehicles (using TfL data) to inform overnight charging infrastructure
- displaying grid capacity at the substation level (using UK Power Network data) to guide deployment decisions.
Challenges
The most significant challenge has been managing the commercially sensitive nature of the data. LOTI invested considerable effort in negotiating data-sharing agreements with operators and continues to enhance the dashboard’s security to maintain trust.
As the EV landscape evolves, LOTI regularly update data-sharing agreements to reflect changes in infrastructure, market conditions and policy.
Top tips
LOTI’s advice for organisations developing similar dashboards:
- co-design with users: engage end users early and often to ensure the tool meets their needs
- iterate based on feedback: continuous improvement ensures relevance and usability
- build strong relationships with operators: trust and collaboration are key to securing data
- include data-sharing clauses in contracts and funding agreements: this ensures long-term access to critical data.
Example data sharing clause
Below is an example data sharing clause based on what was used by LOTI in this work.
This is to help support local authorities who may need to produce something similar, however organisations should take the usual steps necessary to ensure their own legal and data protection colleagues are satisfied with the wording for their own specific context.
“The Service Provider shall be required to provide live charge point data to the Contracting Authorities, TfL, the GLA and London Councils. As a minimum, the Service Provider shall be required to provide the Charge Point Data and Management Information Data provided in the schema on their API, covering the previous 24-hr period which will be accessible by the Contracting Authority, TfL, the GLA and London Councils.
To ensure that data is supplied in a consistent way and is of an appropriate quality the requirements below must be met:
Technical requirements of the API:
- must be REST API
- API must support HTTP GET request to read data
- API Must be encrypted using TLS 1.2, preferably 1.3 (HTTPS)
- data sent by API should be encrypted
- send clear error messages with unique error code and possibly a detailed description
- where the API is unavailable, there must be the facility to make historic calls to cover the outage period
- must include clear documentation about the use of API and include sample calls and responses
- where there are multiple sensors and a get request needs to be made for each one, instructions on how to loop through all APIs each time
- must include metadata for the data
- return data in JSON format
- for large datasets, the ability to subset (i.e. just request for a chosen time period or data value).”
LOTI have also provided details of the data schema
Contact
Jay Saggar, Programme Manager: Data, Smart Cities & Cyber Security, [email protected]