Sustrans London Director, James Cleeton…added: "No responsible government
at local, regional or national level, can let a situation continue where
children, who have no voice in this debate, suffer stunted lungs and 4,000
people die prematurely each year because the air in London is so dirty,
falling well short of World Health Organisation guidelines.”

OK, there’s some inconsistencies in this ULEZ scheme.

As Sustrans London Director, James Cleeton, has decided to play the 4000
premature deaths card, let’s look at some dissonances here.

Firstly, ULEZ was trumpeted to clean up London’s air because that was the
way to reduce those 4000 premature deaths.

After a year of operation, Mayor Khan claimed ULEZ to have been a success.
Unfortunately, there was no mention of the size of the reduction in the
number of deaths. One can safely presume the reduction, if indeed there was
one, was very close to zero.

So not having made the slightest significant dent in the number of those
premature deaths, ULEZ is to expand to include the whole of Greater London.
So far, so good. Perhaps this will divvy up that elusive reduction.

But will it? The expansion of ULEZ has affected a crucial by-election
result, bringing about concern that the electoral prospects of the
Opposition parties in the coming General Election have dimmed.

But more importantly, in order to try to row back on the obvious growing
opposition to ULEZ, including the costs to Londoners, Mayor Khan is now
claiming that only 1 in 10 of cars in the expanded area will be affected.

This claim means that 90% of vehicles in the expanded were already
low-emission types, and it then follows that any improvement in air quality
from restricting vehicular emissions by this method is going to be limited.

This in turn means that there will be little reduction in the number of
pollution-related deaths, and it will quietly disappear from discussions of
ULEZ. It does suggest that the scheme is more concerned with raising money
than with people’s health, but of course it will then be too late to row
back on ULEZ, which was probably the plan anyway.

But the General Election is not far off…

--
Spike