Accessibility and PAS 1899
People with disabilities affecting mobility are often dependent on their cars. Motability, a national charity which uses public funds to ensure such people can access cars, has offered strong incentives for its users to choose electric cars over fuel in recent years, and its survey published September 2025 found that 13% of their scheme customers use an EV as their main car, compared to 4% of the general public.
Many drivers on the Motability scheme have found that the public charging network is not accessible to them, and sentiment about public charging amongst Motability customers is more negative than amongst the public in general.
PAS 1899 is a standard for chargepoint accessibility which was designed by the British Standards Institute in 2022, sponsored by Motability and the Office for Zero Emission Vehicles. The standard is not mandatory.
The full specification is here, while the two-page summary is here. You may see it referred to as "BSI PAS 1899:2022", or with a new year after any future update.
This page covers some of the requirements of the standard, why they are important, how easy they are to implement, and discussion about making the standard, or a future update, mandatory.
Requirements
Implementation
It is not mandatory for public chargepoints to meet PAS 1899, although they must meet the Public Charge Point Regulations 2023.
There are some initiatives set up to track accessibility of public chargepoints, such as ChargeSafe, who are partnered with Motability. Fastned, Osprey, Swarco, and SMS, Source and GRIDSERVE have achieved ChargeSafe Accredited Partner status.
Some local authorities include PAS 1899 compliance as a requirement for tenders to access government-funded public chargepoint programmes. For example, they may say that they require a certain percentage of chargepoints under the partnership to meet the requirements.