On this day, Ulez day – after all the misrepresentations and smothering of the concept by toxic, opportunistic politicians – there are basic facts that bear repeating. When people are breathing in polluted air, doing nothing about cleaning it up means that people will die prematurely. The connection between dirty air and asthma, strokes, Alzheimer’s, bronchus and lung cancers, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and respiratory infections is all proven. If one of your relatives or friends has suffered from any of these serious conditions, then air pollution could have been a contributory factor. And if you are still arguing that you have the right to drive a polluting, life-curtailing vehicle, then ask yourself: is that the person you really want to be?
That doesn’t mean that the capital’s now extended ultra-low emission zone, or Ulez, is the only solution, but it is the most effective one we can put in place today. The Ulez gives us the best and most immediate chance of reducing the number of people dying prematurely, children developing smaller lung capacity and many of us suffering lung and respiratory problems. I agree we should heavily regulate the use of domestic wood burners, have better public transport and dramatically increase the number of electric charging points. I’m happy to listen to anyone who makes the case for additional measures that we should be taking. But having spent 24 years campaigning for clean air, I know that there has never been a shortage of solutions – it is only the political will to implement them that has been lacking.
We should have had a London-wide Ulez a decade ago. The government should have put more money into the scrappage scheme to help people running small businesses and the less well-off to upgrade to cleaner vehicles, but send your complaints to No 10 rather than to London’s City Hall. This government has been telling local authorities (wrongly) that air pollution is their responsibility, while giving them neither the resources nor the powers to deal with it. As soon as any mayor or local authority has shown any willingness to take the hard decisions needed to give their community cleaner air, ministers and their media allies have joined forces to frustrate them.
The Ulez and cleaner air is not some kind of leftwing, control freak’s dream. Boris Johnson first grabbed headlines with this vision of a healthier London in 2014, confirming the measure the following year. For him it was a way of pretending he cared about the environment, while passing on the responsibility – and the flak – to the next mayor, who actually had to implement it. It also distracted his critics from the way he reversed his previous policy and allowed polluting lorries to continue on our roads. So here we are 10 years later with a rightwing furore as Sadiq Khan continues a policy begun by Johnson in line with plans clearly set out to government and acknowledged, if not endorsed, by Tory politicians such as Grant Shapps, whose biggest concern in a letter sent to Khan last year was that central government would not fund it.
Back in 2001, I found myself at a champagne celebration and photocall at 7am with about 20 other campaigners on the boundary of the congestion charge area. I was one of the few politicians who spoke out strongly in favour of the congestion charge. The media were predicting chaos and there were plenty of politicians, including Labour ones, saying it was a big mistake. More than 20 years later the congestion charge has helped finance and promote a big shift towards public transport, with most young Londoners not bothering to learn how to drive until their late 20s.
I predict that expanding the Ulez to outer London will not only deliver cleaner air, but will also have the same acceptance the ban on smoking in public spaces has now achieved. It shares the same basic principle that no one has the right to pollute and poison someone else’s air – especially when all of us are then paying out extra money in taxes to fund the NHS, which has to deal with the ill-health consequences of such self-indulgent behaviour.
Nor do I accept the argument that the Ulez will hit the poorest the hardest; an argument that was also used to assail the congestion charge. The evidence shows that those from the poorest backgrounds emit the least emissions, but are most affected by harmful pollutants in the atmosphere. The lowest-rent housing is often on the busiest roads, such as the south circular road in London where Ella Kissi-Debrah died of air pollution when she was nine years old. She was the first person in the world to have air pollution cited as an official cause of death. It is time to stop others suffering a similar fate to Ella, and the Ulez expansion will help achieve that.
So, today I say to the Tory government, to those who seek to block a public good for political advantage: back in your box. Enough of the culture wars, in the desperate hope that you can gain a few votes. You don’t seem to care about London, nor its people, nor air pollution. But this is a landmark day because the rest of us do.
