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Sadiq Khan launching his air quality consultation at great Ormond Street Hospital on 5 July.
Sadiq Khan launching his air quality consultation at great Ormond Street Hospital on 5 July. Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/PA
Sadiq Khan launching his air quality consultation at great Ormond Street Hospital on 5 July. Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/PA

How bold will Sadiq Khan's air quality improvement programme be?

This article is more than 7 years old

London’s new mayor looks certain to tackle transport-based pollution more effectively than his predecessor but is being urged to go further still

The final day to “have your say” on Sadiq Khan’s plans for improving London’s air quality is Friday, 29 July. Submissions can be accepted until one minute to midnight, so there’s no time lose. Khan’s main proposals, first set out back in May, are as follows:

  1. To bring forward the introduction of an ultra low emission zone (ULEZ) in central London to some time in 2019 from September 2020, which is when Boris Johnson had scheduled it for. Johnson’s ULEZ was set to charge owners of cars, vans and motorcycles that didn’t comply with its emission standards £12.50 a day to drive in the ULEZ, which exactly corresponds to the congestion charge zone. It would differ from it, though, in operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The ULEZ charge was to be on top of the daily congestion charge of £11.50 (or £10.50 for those who pay through the CC Autopay system) and any separate charge raised for breaching standards in the plain old non-ultra Low Emission Zone (LEZ), which has covered practically the whole of Greater London since 2008 and hits non-compliant vehicles with daily charges of between £100 and £200. Khan has confirmed that his ULEZ charge too would be on top of the congestion charge, and said that it will be set at “up to £12.50”, meaning it could be lower.
  2. To expand the ULEZ beyond central London from 2020 and possibly sooner - to the North Circular and South Circular roads for cars, vans and motorcycles and London-wide for lorries, buses and coaches.
  3. To bring in an interim £10 per day emissions surcharge - sometimes called a toxicity charge or “T-charge” for short - from 2017 for all vehicles with pre-Euro 4 emission standards entering central London (primarily those registered before 2006) before the ULEZ comes into effect. This would be levied on top of the congestion charge, exactly like the ULEZ charge. Khan has told Green Party AM Caroline Russell that he anticipates this encouraging “the early adoption of cleaner vehicles ahead of the ULEZ”. It is expected to affect about 9,000 vehicles out of around 150,000 that pass through the congestion charge zone each day.

Khan also wants Transport for London (TfL) to require all new buses operating in London from 2018 to be hybrid or zero emission vehicles and produce plans for a diesel vehicle scrappage scheme in the hope that national government will take them up. He also favours supplying better information for Londoners about pollution levels in the city.

These ideas have received a pretty warm welcome from environmentalists, including the Clean Air in London (CAL) campaign and Russell. They are recognised as representing a big advance on the more cautious and, some say, dubious measures Johnson took under the threat of European Union fines. But how far will Khan go? How far could and should he?

CAL has given Khan a “generous 6 out of 10” for his initiative, but still says “it’s not good enough”. Rather than fining vehicles for emission standard infractions, CAL wants a straight ban on all diesel motors in high pollution areas. “The so-called ULEZ is nothing of the sort,” they say and argue that it is “mathematically impossible” for London to comply with World Health Organisation (WHO) guidelines for nitrogen dioxide (NO2) levels until at least 2025 unless diesel is outlawed.

This view is shared in a new report for the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), which says “it is likely that diesel cars will have to be completely phased out on London’s road over the next decade” in order to comply with legal and WHO NO2 limits and WHO limits for “particulate matter” - microscopic bits of soot and dirt generated by motor vehicles. CAL also calls for a simplification of what could end up as an array of overlapping emission charging schemes into a single, London-wide one.

When Khan launched his consultation at Great Ormond Street Hospital earlier this month, I asked him about a diesel ban. Why not just do it and make a really dramatic difference to air quality right away? Or was part of the thinking on the ULEZ scheme that it would bring in some handy cash for TfL? He replied that his plans were “cost-neutral” and encouraged me to submit ideas to the consultation. This was touching, though I imagine others will have covered that ground better than I could.

As for a fully unified, pan-London emissions charging regime, it’s understood that Khan’s officers regard it as a very interesting idea and have been looking at something similar in California. It would be a long-term goal, but still worthy of examination in the mayor’s consultation. As I write, you have just over 24 hours to help make that happen. Start from here.

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