No driveway, no chargers: Brightlingsea debates how to plug in
A post in the town's busiest community Facebook group has opened a lively debate about electric vehicles in Brightlingsea — and drawn attention to a basic gap: the town does not have a single public charging point.
Writing in The Official Spotted: Brightlingsea group, resident Mat Court pointed members towards Essex County Council's Electrifying Essex event at Colchester Park and Ride on Saturday 18 July. The free event — registration is via the council's Electrifying Essex campaign page — offers advice on running costs and charging, test drives, local EV owners to talk to, e-bikes, e-cargo bikes and pay-as-you-go EV car clubs. It sits within an £8.3 million, government-funded programme to install 5,000 public charging points across Essex by 2031.
Court's local point was blunt: charging an EV is straightforward if you have a driveway, but in Brightlingsea many residents — himself included — have no off-street parking and nowhere public to plug in. He said he had raised this directly with the county council's EV team before the election, and urged residents to make the case in person at the event so the town gets into the conversation "early", before charging trials and rollout decisions are settled elsewhere.
The councillor responds
Brightlingsea's newly elected Essex County Councillor, Aimee Keteca (Reform UK), responded in the thread. She welcomed residents engaging with the event, but said EV charging infrastructure "has not featured as a significant issue in the casework or feedback I've received from Brightlingsea residents to date".
Where there was local demand, she argued, any discussion should bring together the Town Council, district councillors and Essex County Council, "ensuring local views are properly represented before decisions are made". She invited residents to email her directly with their views.
Court replied to the councillor in some detail. He drew a distinction between the tiers of responsibility involved: public charging on council-owned land is a matter for the district and town councils as landowners, while on-street provision falls to Essex County Council as the highways authority. The issue, he said, was not new — he had raised it during the campaign and it had been discussed in town council meetings "for years". Without action, he warned, residents in the lower town who have no driveways risk being "locked out" of EV ownership altogether.
A kerb-side fix — and its complications
Much of the thread turned to how people without driveways could ever charge at home. Steven Goodwin said the council should approve kerb-side cable channels, pointing to Kerbo Charge — the Dragons' Den-featured system that sets a covered channel into the pavement so a cable can run safely across the footway from house to car. He added that he had already emailed Councillor Keteca, and noted the difference between charging from a domestic "granny" cable and a dedicated charge point.
Demand in the town looks real. Louise Griffiths said she and her partner run two EVs between them and that charging is a genuine challenge, asking how residents could get such a scheme started. Court advised contacting the county councillor, attending the event, and writing to the council's cabinet member for highways and transport. Ian Morton put it more briefly: there should be public chargers in Brightlingsea by now.
Not everyone was sold on the kerb-side answer. Andrew Challis warned it could inflame parking tensions in the narrow streets near the harbour, where some residents already treat the space outside their homes as their own — a charging post, he suggested, would only harden those claims. Others debated the wider merits of the switch, weighing the running costs of EVs against hybrids and diesels.
The bind
The exchange neatly captures the position facing coastal towns of older, tight-knit streets: clear interest from EV-owning residents, a workable technical fix on the table, real questions about pavement space and fairness, and a county-level programme that has yet to reach the town. Whether Brightlingsea gets into that programme "early", as Court hopes, may depend on how many residents turn up on 18 July to say so — and on whether the case lands with the councillors he and others are now lobbying.
Based on a discussion in The Official Spotted: Brightlingsea Facebook group.