Cllr Simon Fawthrop is the Chairman of the Executive, Resources and Contracts Committee on Bromley Council.
On 29th August last year the Mayor of London, Labour’s Sadiq Khan, expanded the Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) to outer London, covering, more or less, the whole of Greater London.
At the time many Conservatives said that this was nothing more than a tax grab on those who can least afford it. We said it wasn’t about air quality or that Khan would be doing something about the excessive and harmful levels of pollution on the London Underground. There, “Particulate Matter” of 2.5 microns or less (PM2.5) is often up to 35 times higher than that seen at ground level. The most obvious reason why this isn’t being tackled is because you can’t monetise pollution on the tube network.
To justify his regressive and iniquitous tax, Khan decided to play the air quality card and tell us he was preventing 4,000 deaths a year and that those driving non-compliant vehicles were basically child killers. (The 4,000 figure is a statistical construct, to quote the BBC – no death certificates have been issued with air pollution as the cause of anyone’s demise.) So the argument was this is good for you and everyone’s health. He even commissioned an independent report from a company called Jacobs, which was quickly buried when it explained that the ULEZ expansion would make a negligible difference to air quality in outer London.
Those of us opposed to this expansion repeatedly pointed out the findings of the Jacobs report and the failings of the ULEZ expansion. There can be no doubt that the expansion was designed to raise revenue, because today there are still approximately 700,000 vehicles which are not compliant in Greater London. These are mainly owned by people who cannot afford to get a new car or where the scrappage scheme doesn’t provide enough of an alternative. In many ways, this was a precursor to the current Labour Government, because the elderly who are asset-rich and cash-poor are one of the groups most impacted and targeted by the ULEZ expansion.
Those of us against ULEZ expansion, also pointed out that there was a natural decline in air pollution, as over time people naturally moved to newer less polluting vehicles. This is demonstrated in the Bromley Council NO2 recorded levels since 2017 in microns. As can be seen, this graph shows air quality was improving before ULEZ was expanded.
So it will come as no surprise that Bromley’s annual air quality report has told us that ULEZ expansion has made, at best, a negligible difference to air quality. Guess what? Jacobs was right, and Sadiq Khan was wrong.
The Bromley report is quite emphatic, it says:
“What cannot be seen at present is an overall lowering in pollution levels that can be directly attributed to the implementation of ULEZ in outer London.”
But if Bromley is wrong and Khan is right; he recently claimed the ULEZ expansion is a success – then why didn’t he provided evidence? No data tables or findings were published so that this could be scrutinised to demonstrate the accuracy of those claims. Now that we have data from Bromley, this might explain the absence of any data from Khan. However it’s not just Bromley; digging further I found that the four monitors in Enfield that were within the expansion area all showed increases in NO2 levels.
But the biggest proof that the ULEZ expansion has been a failure for air quality, is the continued roll out of new infrastructure and cameras. If it were the success claimed, why are more cameras needed? For Khan and TfL this must be very frustrating because there are hundreds of volunteers that check for new camera locations every day. TfL need a permit to install the infrastructure and as soon as they publish the permit, this army of volunteers mobilise to attend the site and quite legitimately block any installations. They literally do this by protesting at the proposed site. We know TfL is getting desperate because they have resorted to trying to install infrastructure without a permit, so far without success. Does it sound a bit like a two-tier process? Perhaps not a surprise given the shenanigans going on with this Labour Government.
In reality we know the ULEZ infrastructure is required for road pricing, pay per mile, road user charging, or whatever Khan decides to call it today. We’ll see how Khan’s election promise not to introduce it stands up when is eventually rolled out, either by Khan or this Government – I really can’t see Khan standing up to a Labour Government.