Sadiq Khan’s hated ULEZ expansion had NO impact on air pollution while raking in millions from drivers

Sadiq Khan controversially expanded London’s Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) two years ago at an estimated cost of up to £155 million.

Now a groundbreaking study shows that the passionate opposition at the time was well taken.

Scientists at the University of Birmingham say the extension of the ULEZ in August 2023 will not have a significant impact on reducing air pollution.

London still faces air pollution levels well above international health-based guidelines, experts say.

Campaigners are now calling for the ULEZ, which saddles Londoners with ‘mountains of debt’, to be scrapped altogether.

Town Hall Conservatives Transport and Environment spokesman Thomas Turrell AM told the Daily Mail: ‘This is further evidence that the ULEZ expansion is more about raising money than improving air quality.’

‘This is exactly what TfL’s own modeling showed, yet Sadiq Khan ignores the evidence when it doesn’t suit his own agenda.’

Damning figures released in 2023 showed how the ULEZ expansion generated a whopping £5.3 million in revenue in its first week alone, with drivers making millions more since then.

Introduced in April 2019, the ULEZ allows authorities to charge diesel and petrol vehicles operating in London £12.50 per day if they do not comply with emissions standards.

It uses a camera network that takes photos of vehicle license plates, searches a database to check if the vehicle is compliant, and fines the vehicle owner if it isn’t.

The aim of the ULEZ was to reduce vehicle emissions in some of London’s most polluted areas, but the decision two years ago to extend it to less congested areas proved controversial.

This means the ULEZ now applies to all 32 London boroughs, covering more than 1,500 square kilometers (580 square miles) and nearly nine million people. The area extends to the borders of surrounding counties including Kent, Surrey, Essex and Hertfordshire.

New research at the University of Birmingham focused on two harmful pollutants called nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and PM2.5; This means fine particles 2.5 micrometers or less in diameter, invisible to the naked eye.

While NO2 can aggravate existing heart and lung diseases and cause health problems such as inflammation of the airways, PM2.5 can enter the lungs and then the bloodstream, settling in the heart, brain and other organs.

Following the launch of ULEZ in April 2021 and its major expansion in August 2023, the team examined air quality data collected hourly at 124 sites across London.

They also created a computer model to assess the direct impact of the ULEZ on pollutants in the Greater London area.

Following the launch of ULEZ in April 2021 and its major expansion in August 2023, the team examined air quality data collected hourly at 124 sites across London.

According to the findings, there was a 19.6 per cent reduction in NO2 in roadside areas in central London in the three months after the ULEZ was first introduced in 2019.

Meanwhile, nitrogen oxides (NOx), a broader group of toxic gases that includes NO2, fell by 28.8 percent for the same area over the same period.

However, no significant impact on NO2 or NOx levels was detected following the ULEZ expansion in August 2023.

What’s more, PM2.5 pollution across London as a whole has not decreased significantly not only since 2023, but over the entire period.

Unfortunately, NO2 and PM 2.5 (fine particles that can enter our lungs) pollution in London far exceeds guidelines set by the World Health Organization (WHO).

Study author Professor Zongbo Shi, of the University of Birmingham, agrees that the ULEZ expansion in August 2023 will have a ‘limited impact’ on London air quality.

This, he claims, is because by that point London drivers had largely switched to electric vehicles, which do not emit pollutants like petrol and diesel cars.

“Expansion commitments may have encouraged an earlier transition to cleaner vehicles, possibly explaining the limited additional impacts of the 2023 ULEZ expansion on air quality,” Professor Shi said.

In response to the findings, Mr Turrell hypothesized that the decline in air quality in London was due to the ULEZ.

The team found significant reductions in nitrogen-based pollutants NO2 and NOx shortly after the launch of the ULEZ in 2019, extending beyond the region’s geographic boundaries, including areas covered by the ULEZ expansion in 2023.

He told the Daily Mail: ‘Air quality in outer London is already improving, not because of a policy of reducing millions of people to misery, but because of things like our magnificent green spaces, which he now wants to concrete over.

‘The least the Mayor could do is use the cameras to do something useful, like tackle the car theft epidemic in the outer boroughs of London.’

Councilor Colin Smith, Leader of Bromley Council, described the ULEZ as a ‘cynical tax raid on drivers outside London’.

He thinks the study confirms original concerns raised in 2023 that ‘an expanded ULEZ would be minimal in terms of air quality’.

‘If it had been about air quality, Mayor Khan would have started from where the air in London is most polluted, which is his own tube network, but no, there were no drivers to go around there,’ he told the Daily Mail.

‘The fact is that Bromley had good air quality from the beginning and was among the best in London; ULEZ was an unwelcome regressive tax that remains highly unpopular and divisive to this day.’

In general, research published npj Clean AirIt concludes that the ULEZ alone is not enough to make London’s air quality safe to breathe, despite promising reductions in nitrogen oxides that coincided with the first few months after its initial implementation in 2019.

The authors call for further action to reduce PM2.5, which is released not only from vehicle exhaust but also from tires pressing on the roads.

‘It is important to highlight that the current ULEZ approach does not fully address important traffic-related public health issues such as PM2.5 pollution,’ said co-author Dr Suzanne Bartington.

‘Consequently, we need to see a shift to a more active mode of travel and public transport to reduce the number of vehicles on the roads; ‘This could reduce non-tailpipe PM2.5 emissions and improve public health.’