The NHS has spent nearly £65 million to ensure hundreds of ambulances align with London Mayor Sadiq Khan’s Ulez scheme. The Mail has the story.
Under Ulez, drivers must pay £12.50 a day to drive in the capital if their vehicle fails to meet emissions standards.
It was expanded to cover the whole of Greater London in August.
Freedom of Information requests sent to NHS ambulance services in the South of England reveal the agreements made with Transport for London that exempt them from the expanded Ulez for a short period while their fleet is made compliant.
Each vehicle costs £140,000 to replace. The South East Coast Ambulance Service has until October 2025 to replace 279 vehicles.
The London Ambulance Service said 27% of its frontline fleet is not compliant, so 255 vehicles need replacing.
The charge has also hit staff and patients travelling to hospitals in the zone in non-compliant vehicles.
Following the Uxbridge result, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer said that Mr. Khan should “reflect” on Ulez due to the “impact it’s having on people”.
Tory chairman Richard Holden said: ”These revelations are shocking – even by Mayor Khan’s standards.
“Taxing hardworking people to simply drive their cars was bad enough – but Mayor Khan hammering our NHS ambulance services with tens of millions of pounds of extra cost, just to do their job and get to patients to hospital is downright disgraceful.”
Worth reading in full.
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Every day this country becomes more and more absurd. What we need is to refuse to comply and that goes for the NHS too. Lets see how Londoners get on with no ambulances or tradesmen.
And what hypocrisy from Tory chairman Richard Holden – isn’t Mayor Khan zealously rolling out ULEZ to meet the Net Zero madness that his party imposed on the nation.
Any public service vehicle should be exempt and refuse to pay.
Exactly. What would happen, for instance, if a non-compliant emergency vehicle on call drove into ULEZ and the NHS refused to pay the consequent fine? In fact it may well be cheaper to do sod all about the current fleet and just rack up the charges or fines – cheaper than £65m!
This article is BS. If an ambulance costs £140,000 to replace then paying the £12.50 per day for a non-compliant vehicle it would take over 30 years to rack up the same cost. I do not believe ambulances have a service life of 30 years.
That said, emergency vehicles should remain exempt until they are replaced through obsolescence… Actually, screw the whole ULEZ scheme. It’s a disgrace.
Ah. Beaten to it by richardw53 below. https://dailysceptic.org/2023/11/19/nhs-forced-to-spend-almost-65-million-to-make-ambulances-ulez-compliant/#comment-918455
Irony————The use of words to express the opposite of the literal meaning. ULEZ pretends to save people by impoverishing them and removing their perfectly good cars. It then forces the NHS to spend money on new ambulances instead of on them.
Many of the Public Sector (ie Council) vans I see have been replaced with electric over the last couple of years, despite them being twice the cost. Of course I suppose it to show us proles how we should be living our lives, but I guess the fleet costs have risen dramatically.
And of course in order to make sure the public sector vehicle fleet is ULEZ compliant our taxes must rise to pay for all the upgrades. Smashing.
Would it not have been cheaper simply to pay the fines? Let’s be generous and say each ambulance costs only £125,000 to replace. That represents 10,000 daily ULEZ fines, or around 30 years worth. Longer than the life of an ambulance!
Emergency vehicles under blue light, don’t pay speeding fines, so why should this be any different. Not to waive these charges is immoral.
The whole ULEZ scheme is immoral.
Ultra: Beyond due limit. Extreme. Extremist. Beyond what is ordinary, proper or moderate.
From https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ultra
So, let me get this straight: Hundreds of perfectly serviceable emergency vehicles, designed to save human lives, are now destined for the scrap heap in the name of a pie-in-the-sky fantasy that it will somehow make lives better for Londoners, because they are not “compliant”?
Not only are the NHS and the ambulance service, in acquiescing to this absurdly expensive programme, spending tens of millions of taxpayers money in weakening the service, they’re also throwing vast sums of money in assets down the toilet!
Surely nobody is going to vote this lunatic back into power. How dare he gamble with people’s lives in this way! Every penny spent in a direction other than improving services directly, like the scandalous “Diversity Equity and Inclusion” squandering of funds and now this ditching perfectly good ambulances, in both the short and long term makes people more likely to die. Simple as that.
It’s surely greener not to replace vehicles every time the regulations change. My 20 year old Honda’s going strong and I’m not planning to replace it soon.
But I’m also not going to drive it into London any time soon, so perversely Khan partly wins. He’s still a git though.
£65 million of our taxes spent to satisfy Khan’s anti-human lust for power.
FIFY
Hey, come on everyone, it’s no good some poor patient being picked up by the ambulance only to die on the way to hospital breathing in pure poison from the exhaust pipe! The “addendum statement” to the original Imperial College report was quite clear how dangerous these vehicles are to mankind and how wonderful the ULEZ policy was in improving everyone’s lifespan by decades.
Give the Mayor a break!
The sooner everyone in London is required to wear full deep sea diving gear the better life will be.