Ministers confirmed that public money had been used to construct a network of of 57,567 publicly-funded charging points as of the end of the last financial year.
The figure is roughly double the number electric cars actually registered for use on the road in Britain – around 24,500 as of December 2014, according to the Office for Low Emission Vehicles.
Despite the rarity of electric cars, there are now more than six times as many charging points in Britain as there are petrol stations.
