VAT on charging is “inequity”, says PM’s wife
Recording reveals Be.EVs Marie-France van Heel’s comments on cost of charging
Hello, I’m Tom Riley, and welcome back to The Fast Charge, a British EV newsletter.
Top story in today’s email… Marie-France van Heel, the senior EV executive married to Prime Minister Andy Burnham, said the VAT gap between home and public chargers was an “inequity” as she praised those lobbying for it to be changed, according to audio obtained by The Fast Charge Newsletter.
Elsewhere… I look into the six-figure sale of the Green.TV domain name, lots of local charging updates, and good news… two people have been arrested for EV cable theft near Birmingham.
As always, if you have any comments or feedback, please reply to this email or message me on LinkedIn. And thanks to all the readers who shared last week’s story about carmakers lobbying for a reversal of the 2035 ban; it was a very popular edition.
VAT on public charging is “inequity”, says Marie-France van Heel
Headline: Marie-France van Heel, the wife of Prime Minister Andy Burnham, who is a senior marketing executive and board member of the charging network Be.EV, labelled the VAT gap between home and public charging an “inequity” as she suggested future drivers would be less tolerant of the high pricing that exists today, according to a recording obtained by The Fast Charge Newsletter.
Marie-France made the comments on the Electric Evolution podcast. Run by Liz Allan, the conversation with Marie-France discussed her career, Be.EV, and some of the barriers to the EV sector’s success, including cost of charging, accessibility and misinformation. I obtained a copy of the episode before Andy Burnham became Prime Minister. The podcast has since been removed. When I asked Allan about this, she explained it was taken down at the request of Marie-France herself. Separately, Marie-France has also deleted her LinkedIn profile.
At the time of the recording in 2025… VAT on domestic electricity was 5% versus the 20% applied when using a public charger. It has long been a topic that EV drivers and businesses have called to be equalised. The ‘pavement tax’, as it’s often referred to, was made even greater recently when Burnham became Prime Minister, as his first act was to remove the 5% VAT rate on home electricity supply entirely. This has made the gap between driveway owners and those without off-street parking even larger at 20% from 15%.
In January this year… Be.EV submitted written evidence to the Transport Select Committee saying that under the Cost of Charging Review, which was kicked off by HM Treasury at the last Budget and is due to report later this year, that it was urging the “Government to maintain the ZEV mandate without dilution and to reform policy-driven cost burdens by addressing electricity standing charges, equalising VAT between home and public charging and extending levy relief to public charging.”
A spokesperson for Be.EV declined to comment.
When approached about the recording, a Government spokesperson told The Fast Charge:
“We are boosting the EV transition by saving drivers up to £3,750 off a new car, with more than 95,000 people benefitting already, and investing over £7.5 billion into the UK electric vehicle sector. We’re also reviewing the cost of public EV charging which will look at the impact of energy prices, wider cost contributors, and options for lowering these costs for consumers.”
Listen to Marie-France’s comments on the cost of charging here:
Or read them…
Marie-France van Heel: “I mean, let’s be honest, when you compare it to home charging, public charging can quite often be significantly more expensive, and some people do sort of baulk at the price.
“You know, when they’ve gone to a great site with some great ultra-rapid charging and really cool load balancing technology, and they’ve had a 5% to 80% charge in sort of 20 minutes, you know, they think, ‘okay, fair dues, that was great’. And people are more accepting.
“I mean, people have been quite tolerant. I mean, as we have a new wave of drivers that come on board, they are going to have less, less tolerance for things going forward. We constantly need to think about how we improve.
“The VAT thing. It is what it is. Companies and organisations like ChargeUK are doing a great job to lobby the government on the inequity of that. But we need to keep telling our story and to showcase and prove to drivers that the public charging experience is a great one, and a great addendum to home charging. We’re never expecting people to charge, you know, fully publicly.
“But we need to think about the next wave of drivers. Not everyone’s got the benefit of a driveway and off-street parking. People are going to be heavily reliant on public charging, and those are the people we need to keep front of mind as we progress and build out our network.”
The Green.TV domain is on sale for more than $100,000 – but from whom?
Context: As longtime readers will recall, Green.TV was a well-known media business in the EV sector until it entered liquidation last year. Owned by Ade Thomas, the company went down owing £650,000 – most of that to taxpayers – alongside numerous allegations that staff were treated poorly by him. In May, I learned that Thomas was facing action from Green.TV’s liquidators. At the time, he told me he was in conversation with the liquidators to resolve outstanding issues.
More recently… Thomas has since set up World EV Forum. It’s got numerous big names on its leadership council, such as senior figures from BP, Shell, Nissan, Bolt, Lotus, Amazon, JLR and CATL. The group chair is Ted Cannis, a former senior executive at Ford.
Anyway, why do I bring this up? Well, I recently got a tip-off that the domain name ‘Green.TV’ was for sale. Given my understanding, based on my previous reporting, that Thomas bought back all Green.TV’s assets through a new company (Electricglobalmedia Limited), which he set up at the time of the collapse, I thought I’d check it out and see how much it was going for.
To begin with, I went to the Green.TV domain. On the website, it says the sale is being handled by a domain management company called AyePea Ltd. Their website seemed to me to look very basic. For example, at the bottom of the main page, a reverse search of an image of a man wearing a lanyard linked back to more than 200 other websites, including The Sun newspaper and a page for a ‘Grizzly Bear’ café. This would suggest it’s a standard stock image.
However… the bigger red flag was that the button to take you to Ayepea’s ‘domain portfolio’ is a dead link. Aka, it goes nowhere. All it does is take you to a GoDaddy landing page for the domain ‘dmaine.com’. According to Whois, dmaine.com was only registered in October 2025.
I checked out who owned Ayepea. It was set up on 7 November 2025, according to Companies House. Its owner is a company called Group Zero LTD, which was established on 4 November 2025. The ultimate owner of Group Zero is Jamie Ridyard, who is also a director of Ayepea.
Who is Jamie Ridyard? He is a former Director of Green.TV Media Limited. He worked for the company between 2010 and 2016. When the company collapsed last year, Ridyard still owned 22.33% of ordinary shares, according to the Statement of Affairs published last year.
Using a pseudonym, I contacted Ayepea about a price on 22 June. After a couple of weeks, I heard from Ridyard on 6 July, who emailed from a company called Partnier, which he is CEO of. Partneir is a business that offers marketing services to video game makers. Ridyard told me that he was inviting offers over $100,000 for the Green.TV domain name.
That’s a big number. I checked online estimators, which I admit are far from perfect, though the valuations were much lower. Estibot valued it at $3,500, while GoDaddy valued it at $9,476. I asked Ridyard why it was so high. He explained, “It’s a premium dictionary word domain, with others going for $200k on the .tv tld.” (tld means ‘top level domain’)
After receiving this figure… I contacted Ridyard myself to understand his relationship with Green.TV and the operation of his company Ayepea. In response, Ridyard explained he was an early investor in Green.TV and made clear he was no longer a director when it entered insolvency. On his IP business (Ayepea), Ridyard said he was approached by the owner of the green.tv domain, “Given our expertise in this area we acquired it under a straightforward commercial agreement at what we considered a fair price. We are now marketing it in the ordinary course of business.” He added, “I’m not able to discuss commercial terms, offers, or the internal arrangements of any other entities.”
This was a bit confusing to me. And it opened up a lot of questions. First off, who sold it to Ridyard? Was it the liquidator or Thomas? What was the price? If it’s on offer for more than $100,000 today, was the ‘fair value’ Ridyard acquired it for in this region? And how is the domain sale structured? If it was Thomas’s new company that sold it on, is there any profit-sharing type arrangement if it does sell? And what are the credentials of Ayepea?
I put questions to Ridyard. He declined to answer who he obtained the domain from, even though I directly asked if it was obtained by Electricglobalmedia Limited. He also stated that he would not comment on the destination of any proceeds from a sale.
When asked if he could point to other domains managed by Ayepea. Ridyard commented: “We manage a portfolio of approximately 300 domains, employ a full-time patent attorney, currently have 8 patents pending with a further 13 in progress, and handle trademark filings, WIPO disputes, UK BVD negotiations, and domain acquisitions for clients. AyePea itself is a recently incorporated vehicle within our group structure; the underlying IP activity predates it.”
I have been unable to verify the above claims. Ridyard declined to comment any further, though in our correspondence he did say he’d get the broken portfolio link fixed. Ade Thomas was contacted for comment.
Latest EV news…
🚔 Two men have been arrested and charged for stealing EV cables in Dudley, outside Birmingham. The network in question isn’t named, but where the crime took place, there are sites belonging to MFG EV Power, InstaVolt, and BP Pulse. Read more.
🔋 Talking of charging, Osprey has installed its first battery storage system to support a hub in the town of Abergavenny in Wales. This move will be used to inform whether future sites will add battery storage, especially in areas where grid connections are costly (or lengthy). And I do not believe Osprey is (or will be) alone in using this route to faster deployment a lot more. Read more.
🐴 Remember the Ferrari Luce that everybody hated? Two months after launching, the FT has learned that it’s already met its target of 500 sales. Why? Well, it turns out the Luce was big in Japan China. Read more (paywall).
📉 On the topic of sales, 27,612 used electric vehicles were sold during June, a fall from 30,367 in May and below the boom of 34,932 vehicles sold in April, according to MarketCheck. Read more.
📈 Vertu, the car dealer network, has found searches for ‘kerbside charging’ has risen by 125% in the past three months. Read more.
♿️ New research by Vauxhall has found the number of councils providing accessible on-street EV charging for disabled drivers has doubled in the last 12 months. Read more.
🚑 The London Ambulance Service has added 77 new fully electric vehicles to its fleet, including 37 ambulances and 40 rapid response cars. That brings the total EVs in the fleet to 300 (including hybrids). Read more.
🔌 Lots of local charging updates… Connected Kerb is set to install 260 sockets in Bedford… Connected Kerb has also been selected, alongside EZ-Charge, to build 1,500 chargers in Oxfordshire… Over in Hertfordshire, the County Council has selected Zest to deploy more than 1,000 in the area… Believ, char.gy and Wenea have been chosen to install 3,000 chargers across Devon and Torbay.
🤨 In not-so-positive news… York seems to be in a spin over its public charging. According to a local report, the various political parties seem to be agreed that something needs to improve, but they are not clear on what. And the situation is being made more difficult by numerous chargers being taken offline by BP (see my previous story here) and a cyber incident at a local hub. Golly. Read more.
☀️ Finally, a survey by the charging business Pod has found 84% of people believe an unexpected compliment can turn their day around. And on that note, thanks for reading; you’re a beautiful legend, and I hope you have a smashing rest of the day 👍