Whose permission do you need? For a household that owns a house with a drive, nobody’s. For the 21.5% of Rushmoor households that rented privately at the 2021 Census, the 16.2% that rented socially, and for leaseholders in the borough’s flats, the answer comes before any question about chargers, fuses or grants. This guide is for them.
The house-with-a-drive case, and the network side, are covered on our Aldershot EV charger installation page. Here we go through each kind of household in turn.
If you rent from a private landlord
A charger is a fixture: it is screwed to the wall and wired into the consumer unit. So your landlord has to agree to it in writing before anything is fitted, and when you leave, it stays. Ask early, and put three things in front of your landlord: where the car parks, roughly where the charger would go, and the grant position, because it changes the cost.
That grant is the OZEV chargepoint grant for renters. If you have private off-street or allocated parking, it covers 75% of the purchase and installation cost, up to £500 per socket. Claims must be made through an OZEV-authorised installer; tell us your situation at the quote stage.
If you rent from a housing association or the council
The principle is the same: the landlord’s consent comes first, so the first step is to ask your housing association or the council how it handles a request to alter the property. The grant conditions turn on renting and living in the home with private off-street or allocated parking; check GOV.UK’s guidance against your own tenancy before you rely on it.
If you own a leasehold flat
Purpose-built flats housed 23.2% of Rushmoor households at the 2021 Census. In a block, the outside walls, the car park and the route a cable would take are often not part of the leaseholder’s own flat. So the freeholder’s or management company’s consent comes first, both for fixing a charger to the building and for running a cable beyond the flat. Read the lease, then ask the managing agent in writing, with a sketch of the bay and the cable route.
If your bay is allocated to your flat, the OZEV grant for people who own and live in a flat applies: 75% of the cost, up to £500 per socket. The questions we ask at the survey are which bay is yours, and whether a cable can reach it from your own supply rather than the block’s landlord supply.
If you are the landlord
Residential landlords have their own route: up to £500 per socket, for up to 200 sockets a year. A landlord with several Aldershot properties can fit chargers across them in one programme. If a tenant is also eligible for the renters’ grant, agree with them which route you are using before the quote.
Wellesley and other new homes
Wellesley, the urban extension on former Aldershot Garrison land, was granted planning consent in March 2014 for up to 3,850 new homes, 35% of them affordable. In a new-build, do two checks before ordering anything. First, find out what the developer has already fitted or made ready, since a cable or isolator may already be in place. Second, confirm in writing whether your parking space is allocated to your home and who owns it. The answer decides whose consent you need, and whether the grant applies.
If there is no bay at all
A flat or terrace with on-street parking only is the hard case in Aldershot. Hampshire County Council’s guidance says it does not currently permit cable gullies or cross-pavement channels, and that it cannot give written approval for trailing a charging cable over the footway. The government’s on-street grant needs an approved cross-pavement solution, so for now it has nowhere to go here. Hampshire has won grant funding to investigate channels and says it will publish updates, so it is worth checking its guidance again.
The rest of the picture
DVLA records 2,201 privately kept plug-in vehicles across Rushmoor at the end of June 2026, up from 1,491 a year earlier: 710 more, about 48% on our arithmetic. Rushmoor’s all-keeper total is much higher, but most of those vehicles are company registrations, so the private figure is the one that reflects households.
Aldershot is on SSEN Distribution’s Southern Electric Power Distribution network, and the installer notifies SSEN of the new chargepoint. A home charger installation is standard-rated for VAT at 20%. The charger we fit is EnSmart’s SmartBee-M, a 7 kW smart unit; our EV charger installation cost guide shows what moves a quote, and our guide to who qualifies for the EV chargepoint grant sets out every route side by side. If your landlord or freeholder is also open to panels on the building, our page on solar panels in Aldershot covers that conversation.
A short consent checklist
Before the survey, have these ready: written consent from your landlord or freeholder, or at least a request in progress; confirmation that the bay is private or allocated to your home; and a note of whether you rent or own and live in the flat, because that decides which grant applies. With those in hand, the rest of the job is the same as any other.
Sources: ONS Census 2021, TS054 Tenure and TS044 Accommodation type, via Nomis (read 19 October 2026); GOV.UK, Changes to electric vehicle chargepoint grant schemes from 1 April 2026 (updated 7 July 2026); Hampshire County Council, Electric vehicle charging guidance for residents (read 19 October 2026); Rushmoor Borough Council, Aldershot Urban Extension (Wellesley); DfT and DVLA, VEH0142 licensed plug-in vehicles by local authority, private keepers (published 23 September 2026); NESO GB DNO licence areas (May 2024) and SSEN, Who we are; HMRC, VAT Notice 708/6.