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For anyone who has followed the history of clean air zones in London, or any other UK city, the newly published data about the first six months of the ULEZ expansion to the boundary of the capital will have been unsurprising: our air is cleaner.
The effect of adding a daily surcharge to the dirtiest vehicles has been the equivalent of taking 200,000 of them off the road for a year. More than 96% of vehicles are now compliant with ULEZ standards – up by 5% on last year – and NO2 emissions from cars in outer London have fallen by 13%. For all the doubting and foot dragging, the results are clear. It has worked.
The noise of the debate from this time last year has fallen to a quiet hum, leaving us with the numbers that remind us what ULEZ has always been: a fairly basic piece of public health policy. So, how did we get into such a twist over it?
During the months leading up to the implementation of the latest ULEZ expansion in August 2023, environmental policy in the UK felt the most fragile it had been in decades. Bringing the clean air zone to the entirety of greater London was met with the highest degree of public opposition yet, with the traditionally more rightwing “donut” of boroughs around the edge of London being less well served by public transport and more car dependent.
Mere weeks before the expansion, Labour failed to take a seat in the outer London seat of Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Boris Johnson’s former constituency) in a parliamentary by-election at the height of the tensions over ULEZ.
Given that Labour took Selby and Ainsty on the same day while surging in the polls everywhere, both main parties chalked this loss up as evidence of the unpopularity of ULEZ. Setting aside any mitigating factors such as the fact that the Conservatives had represented this area since the 1970s, it was now open season on anything green.
The then prime minister, Rishi Sunak, gave a speech in September on rolling back net zero tinged with populism and conspiracy theory – most notably the bizarre claim that councils were forcing people to have seven bins.
Sadiq Khan’s Conservative rival for mayor of London, Susan Hall, by the end of the campaign, had turned her platform into something like a single issue – obsessed with frightening the electorate over claimed plans to introduce pay-per-mile schemes on the roads of the capital.
Reform UK put forward the founder of FairFuel UK, a lobbying body for petrol and diesel, making the war on motorist framing even more explicit.
But if you looked at the evidence, there was very little to support the hypothesis that the public could be easily polarised on climate and environment, or wanted politicians to focus less on this agenda. Polling consistently showed that this was a top-five issue for the public everywhere.
In the capital, when you looked at the polling for ULEZ, more Londoners supported it than opposed it, even in outer London. This was also true for other transport policies endlessly debated in the media as if universally loathed such as LTNs (low traffic neighbourhoods) – where polling shows they’ve gotten more popular every year.
A lot of the noise around ULEZ was manufactured by a well-organised and well-funded online campaign helmed by Conservative staffers.
And it was borne out by the eventual election results. Khan was brought back to City Hall for an unprecedented third term on his highest ever vote share, while Hall fell even further back on her predecessor’s disastrous campaign. And Reform was beaten by the Lib Dems. At the national level, Sunak’s gamble saw him plummeting in the polls, and setting him on course for a near extinction event.
Regrettably, it’s Khan who has come out of all this most afraid of his own shadow, despite being the most vindicated.
During the mayoral campaign, he was dogged by a few lines in his recently published book about plans to introduce a pay-per-mile scheme, plastered across countless attack ads. His newly published paperback version is said to contain a few lines backing away further from this position, citing the success of ULEZ as a reason he’s able to put this policy aside.
This fails to reflect the reality of the situation, nor does it reflect the courage and the confidence he should be feeling at the moment.
ULEZ has taken great strides to clean up our air, but there’s still a lot of work to be done to tackle traffic and protect our climate. While last week’s report is a huge validation of the value of clean air zones to do exactly what they are intended to do, there is no data on what the policy has done for CO2 levels, and there is no associated fall in traffic as a result of the expansion.
The Mayor’s own transport strategy commits him to cutting car trips by about a third and making 80% of trips by walking, cycling and public transport by 2041. To achieve this, we will need to go further than public health policies which were never primarily instruments of traffic reduction, and have had diminishing returns further from the centre of London where car dependence is higher and modal shift is harder to achieve.
If there’s a war on cars, the cars have been winning. London hosts the SUV capital of the UK in the borough of Kennington and Chelsea, where one in three new cars bought are high emission SUVs, vastly outstripping the sales of new EVs. To fix the problem of surging ownership of these lumbering urban tanks in the wealthier and outer boroughs of the capital, a supertax is needed, such as the tripling of the price of on-street parking brought forward in Paris after a public referendum.
Rightly, the mayor’s 2018 transport strategy embraced exploring road pricing schemes from which he’s now at pains to distance himself. If implemented, this would have the effect of cutting traffic in absolute terms, while also affording us the luxury of setting prices by emissions which trash our climate as well as our lungs.
There is no time to be timid on this. Luckily, nor is there any reason to be. Khan faced down political opposition and was rewarded for his leadership by a public that refuses to be polarised on green policy which is so much more popular than its opponents would have you believe. He can keep going.