The 24/7 helpline rule for EV charge points — and the quarterly report nobody warns you about

If you operate public EV charge points in the UK, you already know the Public Charge Point Regulations 2023 brought in duties on contactless payment, 99% reliability, open data and pricing. The one that quietly creates the most ongoing work is Regulation 9 — the helpline. It isn’t just “have a phone number”. It’s a staffed line, running around the clock, plus a report you have to file every quarter. This is a plain-English walkthrough of what it asks for — and where operators tend to get caught out.

What Regulation 9 actually requires

The regulations require an operator of public charge points to provide a telephone helpline for consumers that is:

• Free to use— the government’s guidance is explicit that a number charged at a local-call rate does not meet the requirement.
• Staffed, in real time— it must be answered by a person who can help during the call. A voicemail facility does not satisfy the requirement.
• Available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
• Advertised at the charge points— the contact details must be displayed prominently on or at the charging site.

These duties applied from 24 November 2024. So far, so manageable — a freephone number and a rota. The part that keeps coming back around is the reporting.

The quarterly report most people underestimate

Regulation 9 also requires operators to report on the helpline to the government every quarter. According to the official guidance, each report must set out:

• the total number of calls the helpline received in the quarter;
• a breakdown of those calls by the type of assistance sought;
• a breakdown of how long calls took to resolve, expressed in 10-minute intervals;
• the percentage of calls not resolved by the reporting date, and the reasons why.

There’s a crucial constraint attached: the report must not contain any personal datarelating to callers or their vehicles. So it has to be aggregate figures — counts and bands — not a call log. Reports go to the Secretary of State and the enforcement authority, and the Office for Product Safety and Standards (OPSS) enforces the regulations.

Where operators get caught out

The helpline itself is the easy bit. The friction shows up at quarter-end, when someone has to produce four specific things from a pile of call records:

• Time-to-resolution in 10-minute bands.Most phone systems can tell you call duration; far fewer can tell you, per call, whether the issue was actually resolved and bucket that cleanly into 0–10, 10–20, 20–30 minutes and so on.
• Type of assistance sought.This means reading what each call was actually about — a payment problem, a unit fault, an account query — and grouping it. Doing that by hand across a quarter of calls is the job nobody wants.
• Unresolved percentage and the reasons.You need a defensible definition of “resolved” and a way to list why the rest weren’t — again, without naming a single caller.
• No personal data.The obvious shortcut — exporting the call log — is exactly what the regulations say the report must not contain.

Turning the calls you already handle into the return

This is where NumberGroup fits. We’re an Ofcom-licensed UK carrier, so we can provide the free-to-use number your helpline runs on. But the useful part for a charge point operator is what we can do with the calls once they come in: transcribe and analyse them to produce structured data covering the metrics Regulation 9 specifies — total calls, type of assistance, time-to-resolution in 10-minute bands, and the unresolved breakdown with reasons, as aggregate figures with no personal data. You review the output and remain responsible for what you submit, but the groundwork is done for you rather than assembled by hand.

You keep running the helpline with your own people — that’s the part the regulations want staffed by humans, and it should stay that way. What we aim to reduce is the quarter-end manual work of reconstructing the numbers from raw call records. The calls you’re already handling become the evidence base for the return, rather than a data-entry project every three months.

It also gives you something the report alone doesn’t: a running view of how quickly callers are actually reaching a person on each of your lines — useful well beyond the compliance box, since a staffed, responsive helpline is the whole point of the rule.

Where to start

Read the regulations and the government’s guidance in full, and take your own compliance advice — this article is an explainer, not legal advice, and the detail of your obligations depends on your estate. If you’d like to talk through the helpline number and the reporting side, we’re happy to help whether or not you ever move anything else to us.