A fight to improve London’s air quality, vehicle by vehicle

Nick Arlett is a retired contractor living in West Wickham, South East London and owns a Renault Trafic van that runs on diesel. If Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, has his way, Mr. Arlett will soon have to pay about $16 a day to drive his vehicle around town – an amount that Mr. Arlett says he can’t pay.

That’s because Mr. Khan plans to do so on August 29 expansion of London’s Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) to every borough of the capital to improve air quality and prevent illnesses and deaths from air pollution. To prevent the measure from going ahead, Mr. Arlett is leading a campaign called “Action Against ULEZ Extension” with some 30,000 members.

“I would be absolutely immobilized,” said Mr. Arlett in a telephone interview about the ULEZ expansion. Noting that he was living on “a pretty meager pension”, he added: “I can’t see anything at the moment other than being cooped up inside because I can’t afford to go out.”

Mr Arlett said many in the area were much worse off, such as older adults and disabled people whose carers would soon be “unable to get to them” because they too had non-compliant cars.

“People will die. People will kill themselves,” said Mr. Arlett. The mayor ‘will cause many deaths’. As for roughly $140 million demolition plan that mr. Khan has set up to compensate drivers of non-compliant cars, it has detailed eligibility criteria and Mr. Arlett said he knew a number of people who applied for the scheme and were turned down.

The expansion of the ULEZ brings five million extra people into a scheme launched in central London in 2019. According to city officials, 90 percent of vehicles in the expansion zone already comply.

Improving air quality and finding local solutions to climate change are among the topics discussed at the conference by leaders in business, politics and policy London Climate Action Weekwhich runs through Sunday.

The expansion of ULEZ is met with howls of protest not only from Mr Khan’s political opponents – five Conservative Party-led local government bodies or councils have begun a judicial review at the Supreme Court to halt the proposed expansion – but of four legislators from his own Labor Partywho accuse him of hurting working people when household budgets are under extreme pressure.

The ULEZ has also sent angry citizens like Mr. Arlett onto the streets and incited an angry minority to damage city equipment. In March, farmers drove tractors through the streets of Orpington, south-east London, in protest. Dozens of acts of vandalism have been committed against ULEZ surveillance cameras within the planned expansion zone: cameras’ cables have been cut and their lenses painted black.

Mr Khan, who has been mayor of London since 2016, has personal reasons for reducing air pollution. In 2014, he was asked to run the London Marathon as a Member of Parliament raise money for a good cause. After being declared fit by a medical examination, he trained for eight weeks and ran the marathon.

A few months later, he noticed that he was not feeling well: he cleared his throat in mid-sentence and wheezed when playing football with friends or going jogging. In late 2014, he was diagnosed with adult-onset asthma.

“Doing something I enjoyed – running – in the city I love would have made me sick,” said Mr. Khan in one podcast interview with The Guardian last month. “That’s where my journey to learn more about the causes of air pollution began. And then I discovered: the same thing that causes air pollution causes climate change.”

Driven by his own experience, and by one The death of a 9-year-old girl from an asthma attack caused by air pollution in London, mr. Khan announced in 2017 that he followed his predecessor’s plans, Boris Johnson, the introduction of the ULEZ in London, and imposing a daily charge on non-compliant vehicles driving around the capital. The ULEZ started in central London in 2019 and expanded to a wider area in October 2021.

Mr. Khan, who has just published a book called “Breathe: Addressing the Climate Emergency”, said in the Guardian podcast: “I think clean air is a human right, not a privilege.”

According to a report published by the mayor’s office, pollution levels in central London are 21 per cent lower than what they would have been without the ULEZ. Since the zone was first expanded in 2021, the area has seen 60 percent – ​​or 74,000 – fewer polluting vehicles and improved air quality for more than four million people.

prof. Frank Kelly, a global expert on the health effects of toxic air who heads the Environmental Research Group at Imperial College London, said air pollution is a salient, though invisible, risk to human health.

“There is an overwhelming amount of evidence that the health effects of air pollution are serious and can affect almost every organ of the body,” Professor Kelly wrote in a post on the Imperial Medicine Blog. “Recent studies and large research programs have also shown that these adverse health effects are not limited to high exposures, but can also occur at very low concentrations.”

He noted that London’s inner cities had made “significant progress in improving air quality” in recent years, adding: “In London’s suburbs, where such interventions are lacking, improvements in air quality have been much slower. “

According to the mayor’s $140 million demolition plan, car and wheelchair-accessible vehicle owners must “have a certain income or disability benefit” to qualify; those that do get up to about $2,500 for a car and up to about $6,400 for a wheelchair-accessible vehicle. Grants from about $6,400 to about $12,000 are available to small businesses, sole proprietors, or registered charities that own vans and minibuses.

But the opposition persists. In a telephone interview, the leader of Bromley’s council, Colin Smith, explained why Bromley was one of five London boroughs pushing for a judicial review of the ULEZ expansion.

“The damage goes to local businesses, local employment and the sustainability of vital healthcare networks,” he said. He noted that a significant number of care homes were occupied by older adults whose caregivers and relatives did not have compliant cars and who, under an expanded ULEZ, would no longer be able to visit them.

The mayor is “trying to tax: he’s a politician,” said Mr Smith, who argued that Mr Khan’s aim was “to set up a network of cameras” stretching all the way to the outer borders of Greater London,” at which point he’s moving to mileage charging,” a pay-per-mile plan that charges each car based on how it uses the road network.

Mr Khan is running for what would be a record third term in May 2024.

But in a video interview Shirley Rodrigues, deputy mayor for environment and energy, rejected any suggestion Mr Khan was in it for the money. She said all the funds raised by the ULEZ expansion plan — estimated by city officials at $250 million in the first two years, falling to zero by 2026-27 — were earmarked for London’s public transport system and the construction of new bus routes.

The deputy mayor said 4,000 Londoners died prematurely every year from air pollution, thousands of asthmatics were admitted to hospitals and children grew up with permanently stunted lungs.

“There is a lot of ignorance about air pollution. The problem is it’s an invisible killer,’ Mrs Rodrigues said. “More than half of London’s households don’t even own a car. And the poorest are most affected by air pollution.”