LONDON — Sadiq Khan is under pressure to ditch a controversial plan to clean up London’s air after a bruising by-election for the mayor’s Labour colleagues. But scrapping the plan is no panacea — and critics will have to explain what replaces it.
London’s Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) aims to reduce the U.K. capital’s emissions of nitrogen dioxide and nitrogen oxide (referred to together as NOx) by imposing a charge on polluting vehicles when they enter the zone. It’s set to expand to cover the whole of London from the end of August.
Excess NOx emissions are incredibly dangerous for human health. They can cause inflammation of the airways, asthma, reduced lung function, and increase the rate of hospital admissions. In fact, poor air quality is considered by the British government to be “the largest environmental risk to public health in the U.K.”
Khan is standing behind the scheme, and on Friday announced extra funding for businesses and individuals who will have to buy or retrofit a vehicle in order to avoid the charge.
But the Conservatives — who won a by-election they had been tipped to lose by fighting against the plan — say Khan should either ditch the idea altogether or halt its expansion. Even some of Khan’s Labour colleagues want a big rethink.
It would be easy to look at that situation and say a lot of these arguments would go away if Khan simply threw in the towel — but he can’t.
The U.K. is bound by a swathe of legislation — including the Gothenburg Protocol and the Environment Act 2021 — to keep certain pollutants under a specific threshold.
And the British government has already lost a number of court cases from environmental law group ClientEarth in which it was found to have breached these legal limits.
The first of these court cases was lost by the government in 2015. As a result, ministers have had to pedal hard to introduce policies to try and lower the toxicity of the country’s air.
For the rest of the U.K., this is the job of the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, but for London, it’s a problem for the Mayor and the Greater London Authority.
Then-London Mayor Boris Johnson actually introduced ULEZ in 2015, while other Clean Air Zones — similar in concept to ULEZ — have been in the works since the same year.
Since ULEZ went into force in 2019, nitrogen dioxide levels have dropped by 50 percent — but this is only in the inner city.
As a result, Khan announced the now-looming expansion. If it doesn’t happen — and if the pollutant levels don’t continue to fall — then London’s administration, as well as the wider U.K. government, faces the prospect of fresh legal challenge.
Data from Khan’s City Hall shows that Greater London’s air pollution also presents a stark inequality problem: areas with poor air quality have a disproportionately high number of people from Black, Asian, and minority ethnic backgrounds. Khan has described air quality as “a matter of social justice and racial justice.”
Debates about ULEZ look unlikely to go away, and Khan will continue to face questions over the specifics of the scheme. But legal requirements to clean up Britain’s air are also here to stay.