Sadiq Khan’s Ulez expansion to outer London failed to lower pollution levels, a report has found. The Telegraph has the story.
Bromley Council measured no “overall lowering in pollution” in the months after the Mayor expanded his £12.50 daily charge zone to cover the whole city last year.
The partly rural borough, which is the largest in London, saw pollutants emitted by vehicles increase after the charge was imposed on August 29th 2023, a report by the council’s environment committee said in June.
It found that in November last year, three months after the Ulez expansion, levels of pollutant nitrogen dioxide were higher across all the borough’s 32 air quality monitoring locations than they were in the preceding August.
The increase was blamed on “seasonal weather and temperature variations” and only eight of the locations saw more nitrogen dioxide in December 2023 than in August that year.
However, when comparing the data with 2022, the report concluded: “What cannot be seen at present is an overall lowering in pollution levels that can be directly attributed to the implementation of Ulez in outer London.”
The report added that the pollution levels in 2022 it compared its recent data with may have been artificially suppressed by the after-effects of Covid restrictions. The last major pandemic restrictions on travel were removed in July 2021.
It comes as City Hall maintains its own research, released in July measuring the success of the Ulez expansion in reducing air pollution, proves the scheme is working “even better than expected”.
The report measuring pollution across the capital released by the mayor’s office claimed that exhaust emissions from cars in outer London were estimated to be 22% lower than without last year’s expansion.
Worth reading in full.
In other news, Transport for London (TfL) has been forced to issue an apology after using “made-up” data inflated tenfold to justify a multi-million pound upgrade to a major roundabout.
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Brilliant! Thank you.
This is certainly why I continue to subscribe to this site; an oasis of sanity in a weird, weird world.
And the central premise is spot on. Britain is such a weird out at the moment because of the size of the public sector……and the public sector is run by Abilene’s Paradox (thank you: today’s round up).
The Abilene Paradox revisited – how we have turbocharged groupthink in the workplace and what to do about it
Blair’s Britain: socialist fascism, probably by accident………
Excellent piece of investigation. Is it any wonder that this is the “none of the above” election?, when politicians tax us to death and then waste it on this pathetic, infantalising nonsense.
I always thought self care was about personal hygiene, clealry not these days, self care appears to be fostering a race of weak, scared, pathetic self decalred victims who need to be nursery nursed all the time.
As Oscar Wilde said a play will be either good or bad and the audience will decide.
There is nothing offensive or difficult that cannot be dramatised in the right way to make the audience think about the subject and The Father and The Producers are good examples of this.
Great piece ,keep up the good work
, it’s amazing that no such care was available before or after The Jabathon ! The Hypocrisy is overwhelming !!!…
Good point Freddy.
I believe “Informed Consent” has been deleted from the medical lexicon has it not?
.. and First, Do No Harm.
How did human beings ever evolve in the first place? There was no one to warn us of the dangers of the damp cave. No one to provide therapy for our fear of Sabre Toothed Tigers. No phoneline to talk us through the trauma of losing our 3 kids to a pack of Hyena’s who ripped the guts out of them in front of us.
Why would a play about relationship issues of a Lesbian criminal after a sudden power cut look like a relief from anything? Looks like the (obviously female) author revisiting her past group therapy sessions for want of anything else to do.
Ain’t got nothin’ to say but gonna talk a lot, anyway!
“Self-care advice – Breathe”. I find breathing is an excellent self care tool – just to keep alive.
Quite partial myself.
I am a big believer in supporting the arts but not where nonsense like this is concerned. This level of wokerarty is sinister and malevolent and taxpayers should not be used to fund this crap. If the theatres responsible for this grotesquery had to fund this rubbish without grants it would cease within a month.
There are two words for the audiences visiting these plays / shows : Grow Up.
I have always been puzzled by the term “lived experience.” Would it’s opposite be “dead experience?” If so it strikes me as being oxymoronic.
Surely living is synonymous with experience.
The opposite would be hearsay or book learning. Obviously, everybody has a lived experience but this individual lived experience is usually not about the really important issues of our time, like the unspeakable terror of the gay adult entertainment performer who’s denied entry into the kindergarten (assuming this was still the case). That’s a lived experience of anti-trans discrimination while the typical member of polite society will only have heard of such horrific abuses.
It’s a deliberate distortion of the English language I think. It seems to mean a few things – the most important being that how certain favoured victim groups view and interpret the world trumps hard evidence and the “lived experience” of people not in those favoured victim groups. Another attempt to deny objective reality which keeps coming up with inconvenient truths.
Thanks tof
Hear hear!
Personally, I’d be far more worried about being mugged coming out of the Bush Theatre or Broadway Theatre in Catford than any of the “self-care” bollox they’re banging on about.
I’m shocked that this article didn’t have a trigger warning! I’m now traumatised at the amount of Taxpayers (my) cash spent on this, and I’n not sure which of the many funded support groups I should call
Brilliant
I love “the arts” but my default assumption until I see strong evidence to the contrary is that anything new will be woke and is to be avoided. There’s plenty of old stuff that I have not seen or read – great stuff that will last me a lifetime.