London is about to introduce a game-changing policy to help all Londoners breathe cleaner air. Here’s why this chance should not be missed and what you can do about it.
Most days, you cannot see or touch air pollution in London, or in other urban areas in the UK. But it’s there: a silent, deadly menace.
The more we know about the effects of air pollution, the more compelling the case for clean air.
Air pollution makes us sick throughout our lives
A recent study by Imperial College London brought together all the current medical evidence on how air pollution affects our health.
It shows that pollutants from vehicles, industry and other sources affect fertility, unborn babies, infants, children, and adults. Air pollution impacts our circulatory and respiratory health and every organ in the body. It causes inflammation, crosses the blood-brain barrier and impacts on our brain and our mental health (hence the theme of Clean Air Day 2023).
UK-wide, it is estimated that air pollution is responsible for the equivalent of between 29,000 and 43,000 deaths each year and that the ill health it causes costs the NHS and care providers £20 billion. London, with up to 4,000 deaths per year, bears more of this burden than any other region.
What has this got to do with the much-discussed expansion of London’s ULEZ? The acronym has now grown larger than the thing it represents, because of some concerted and somewhat mendacious campaigning.
Clean air zones reduce pollution
The Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ), first introduced in central London in 2019 and expanded to include all of inner London in 2021, is London’s clean air zone. It’s a fact that we can’t have clean air without clean air zones – a fact recognised by central government, medical and pollution experts, and local councils.
From 29 August 2023, London’s clean air zone – the ULEZ, which focuses on vehicles because motorcycles, cars and vans are still the biggest single source of the city’s pollution – will be expanded to cover the whole of Greater London.
Why? Because every London borough has levels of air pollution that breaches World Health Organization guidelines. And outer London boroughs – such as Bromley, Croydon and Bexley, which will covered by the expanded ULEZ – have a greater medical burden from air pollution than other London boroughs.
In other words, people living in what are often seen as ‘leafier suburbs’ further from the city’s centre have more to gain from clean air than anyone else in London.
Clean air zones work best when they have teeth. Such is the case with the ULEZ in London, which aims to reduce pollution by introducing a charge of £12.50 a day for the use of older and more polluting vehicles.
You only have to pay if your vehicle does not comply with ULEZ emissions standards and you use it. Transport for London estimates that more than 90% of vehicles seen on the road inside the expanded zone area are already ULEZ-compliant.
The introduction of the expanded ULEZ is accompanied by a £110 million scrappage scheme to help vehicle owners with the costs of getting rid of non-compliant vehicles.
Evidence from the inner London ULEZ shows how important clean air zones are. Since its expansion to cover the area inside the North and South Circular Roads (inner London), the ULEZ has cut pollution levels by a quarter, reduced the number of polluting vehicles on the road by 74,000 and helped children in 1,362 schools breathe cleaner air.
Clean air is most important for poorer neighbourhoods
Is the ULEZ fair?
A lot of the criticism of the ULEZ expansion has focused on the cost for households and small businesses with non-compliant vehicles, but a lot less on the benefits of clean air.
There’s plenty of evidence of an inverse relationship between income and pollution. That means that the lower your income, the less air pollution you create. And there’s also a lot of evidence that poorer households are more exposed to poor quality air.
UK-wide, the households with the lowest incomes are much less likely to own a car, whereas better-off households often own more than one vehicle. In London, this is even more pronounced, with more than half of households in many poorer neighbourhoods in outer London boroughs having no car or van. (You can search your area using the ONS’s map of vehicle ownership by household based on 2021 census data.)
Even among car owners in poorer neighbourhoods, there’s little evidence that their vehicles are older and more likely to face the £12.50 ULEZ charge. In fact, the oldest vehicles are often the second, third or fourth car of wealthier households.
It should be noted that, while the public debate is noisy and can appear one-sided, most Londoners do back this policy – as shown by polls from a number of organisations (including our own Clean Air Public Insights Tracker (CAPIT) and Asthma + Lung UK). Endorsing London’s approach, the right-leaning Centre for Policy Studies has given the ULEZ a firm thumbs up, saying that in recent focus groups there is ‘strong public backing for clean air zones to tackle air pollution, including among 2019 Conservative voters’.
Clean Air Day is a celebration of what we can achieve
Clean air zones, like the ULEZ in London, are not the only policy that’s needed to ensure that we cut the dire health and economic costs of air pollution. But it’s hard to see how we can have clean air without them.
This Clean Air Day, 15 June 2023, as well as supporting hundreds of events across the UK, Global Action Plan is inviting you to help secure London’s clean air future by sending your councillor a message of support for clean air measures. Let’s use our collective voice to speak up and take this chance for change.
If you’re in London, you can add your voice to the majority who support the ULEZ and don’t want to waste time with delays. If you live elsewhere, you can ask your councillor what their plans are for clean air. The best councils will have action plans to cut air pollution.
With toxic air pollution cutting thousands of lives short, causing miserable ill health including among children and coming at a very high cost to the NHS, there is no time to waste.
