Ulez Expansion Failed to Lower Pollution Levels, Report Finds

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.