13 April - Thinking about ULEZ, Part 6 - Valley of Decision
Part 6 of @tonyofsidcup’s Magnum Opus on why he thinks ULEZ will be good for London. I think I might be more inclined to support ULEZ if the Mayor and his acolytes didn’t have to resort to lies to justify it.
4,000 deaths in London due to exhaust fumes turns out to be “contributed to” and that in turn may mean ‘died three weeks earlier than might have been the case’.
Why do they find the need to falsify the evidence? As an occasional photographer one look at the propaganda photo (below left) had me asking why
is the visibility of the background not far worse than the foreground? If the fog was that bad near at hand you wouldn’t be able to see into the distance at all, but it is equally obscured.
One click in PhotoShop removed the filter and revealed the rather poor photograph beneath it. Why the need to resort to lies all the time?
And now for @tony…
I
would like to apologise to readers for
the long wait since Part 5. In Part 6, I wanted to tackle the big question
- “Is ULEZ expansion to Outer London a good idea?” - and I found it much harder than debunking the various
ULEZ-related falsehoods, examined in
Parts 1-5. To get to a view that I was comfortable with, I have looked at
air-pollution data for Bexley,
reviewed a scientific-looking paper by ULEZ opponents, had an email exchange with UK’s top
air-pollution scientist - and liberally procrastinated.
As part of this procrastination, I asked Bexley how much money they committed to the legal challenge to ULEZ, pursued by the Tory-run councils
of Bexley, Bromley, Hillingdon, Harrow and Surrey. Earlier, it came to light that Bromley had reserved £140,000. It turns out that Bexley
has set aside £100,000, and already spent £18,000.
I think of £100,000 as money that could have built 5-10 pedestrian crossings to protect
the borough’s children, and see the council’s decision as Bexley Tories doing their party’s bidding at our expense. Naturally, if you oppose
ULEZ, you probably approve of the legal challenge: its merits and chances are hard to judge. Which view is more common? It looks like a
borough-wide
poll would be fairly inexpensive - but neither Bexley nor any other litigant council chose to spend a pound to consult voters before committing
hundred pounds to their own preferred action.
It
may be because the poll wouldn’t have produced the answer that Teresa and Co. wanted. Recall that ULEZ opponents’ best poll showing was 51%
- Part 3 explained why the higher percentage seen in the ULEZ consultation would be grossly misleading as an indicator of the popular opinion,
and anyone pushing it as such must be, to use a colourful Russian expression, “slapped with urine-soaked rags” - and this was achieved with a
manipulative wording that was fair game for a partisan group that commissioned the poll (the City Hall Tories), but beyond the pale for a council.
However, I suspect that the thought to consult with Bexley residents simply never occurred to Baroness O’Neill, and the decision to spend £100,000
of Bexley taxpayers’ money on a publicity campaign to damage the Labour mayor was effectively made at the Conservative Central Office.
“Even if the majority is for ULEZ - a big if - public policy isn’t simply about what the majority wants”, Baroness may scoff. “We do want policies
that benefit the majority, but the minority must be protected. ULEZ fails this test”. I see merit in this argument. While I do not accept that
tax-free air-pollution - or even tax-free car travel - is a human right, l cannot dismiss the fact - and some ULEZ enthusiasts unfortunately do - that for
many low-income owners of non-compliant cars, ULEZ is going to mean genuine hardship.
Imagine a care worker, driving a non-compliant car for work, struggling to feed her household after £300 more comes out of her household’s monthly
budget to pay ULEZ charges. Hunger, or inferior cheap food, damages a child’s health a lot more visibly than nitrogen dioxide or particulate matter.
For some reason, people facing real distress in August do not get much attention from the press. The “journalists” of The News Shopper and similar outlets
appear to be more at ease with middle-class characters like Sue, 65, who favours her sporty Mercedes over the
“bloody inconvenient” tube, or a mechanic specialising in cars like Sue’s.
The most down-to-earth character of anti-ULEZ discourse is the tradesman in a
non-compliant van who tells The News Shopper that ULEZ is going to drive him
out of business. The journalist never asks the tradesman what kind of rates they charge and what kind of hours they work if extra £12·50 a day makes that
much of a dent. As a homeowner, I am very aware of the high rates charged by the Checkatrade brigade, and I am 100% confident that a £12·50 daily charge
can be, and will be, passed on to customers, without much impact on demand.
And then you hear, for example, Bexley Cabinet Member Seymour report
ULEZ-linked difficulties of workers at Queen Elizabeth Hospital. I sympathise with
QEH nurses - but then ask what party has made it so that an NHS nurse cannot afford extra £300 pm, or a better car. More recently, what party refused
to fund a ULEZ scrappage scheme in the same way it funded scrappage schemes for other English cities? Of course, it’s Cllr Seymour’s Conservatives,
cruelly inflicting pain on Londoners to turn them against the Labour mayor. But it is what it is, and the choice is not between a “perfect”,
scrappage-scheme-supported ULEZ and no ULEZ, but between the imperfect, underfunded ULEZ and no ULEZ.
Let’s look at Bexley. According to the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, in late 2021, 27% (or just under 27,000) of
Bexley-registered
cars and 55% (or about 5,500) of Bexley-registered LCVs were non-ULEZ-compliant.
(This was over a year ago, and the non-compliant numbers have fallen by now). I am going to ignore LCVs - one in twelve Bexley vehicles
- and focus on cars. With 78% of Bexley households owning a vehicle, per 2021 Census data, I will guess that 20% of Bexley households own
a non-compliant car. Without dismissing pensioners or workless households, I want to focus on working people, who need their car to get to
work, every weekday, and ballpark 15% of those. In 2021, 35% of Bexley residents worked from home - note that the
post-Covid year was not a
usual time - but it would be wrong to take 35% off 12%: we don’t know how to “distribute” the home workers across households. We have the same
problem when we want to exclude people who travel to work without driving - the majority even in Bexley - as we have the percentage of residents,
but not the percentage of households. One has to make another guess. I go with 7·5% - meaning that 7·5% of Bexley households will have to
pay ULEZ charges for their commute to work. Now, most of them will be able to afford £300 pm, but some will find it hard. How many? More guesswork.
I will say a fifth will be poor, giving me 1·5%, or about 1,500 households. They are Bexley’s “ULEZ victims”.
(This back-of-envelope calculation may well be more than Bexley has done to date. The council has set up a bipartisan “task force”, chaired
by the “environmentalist” Cllr Smith, to develop Bexley’s “coping strategy”. Nothing has come out of this yet, but stay tuned for bright
ideas and bold proposals from this A-team).
Now, let’s talk about Bexley’s air
- and counterintuitively start in Bromley. Bromley politicians have been very active in the anti-ULEZ
movement. Sidcup’s gift to Orpington - and Boris Johnson’s man in the London Assembly when Mayor Johnson announced plans for ULEZ - Gareth Bacon
MP has become a regular contributor to The Telegraph, lamenting Zone 1 Khan’s disregard for the bucolic, and
car-dependent, areas like Biggin
Hill. Bromley’s answer to Teresa O’Neill, Council Leader Colin Smith has persuasively argued against ULEZ via interviews and official
statements. Both Bacon and Smith have spoken of Bromley’s clean air. How do they know it’s clean? How many
air-quality monitoring stations
does Bromley have? Let me give you a hint: Bexley has 3. Maybe we can make a guess based on the borough land area. #BrilliantBexley covers
61 square kilometres. Bromley, London’s largest borough, has 150. 3x150/61 = 7·5. Shall we say 7? How about 1. As of now, London Borough
of Bromley has a single air-quality monitoring station, located near the Glades shopping centre. You can see the problem. You can only
evaluate what you measure, and if you don’t measure much - and it is you who decides how much money to spend on
air-quality testing
- there’s less chance of an uncomfortable finding. In very simple terms: no measurement, no problem.
Positively, Bexley has done better in this regard than its richer neighbour, although you will not enjoy learning the reason. Riverside
Energy Park may have “park” in its name - “river” too - but in reality it’s a giant waste incinerator in Belvedere, burning rubbish
brought to it on the Thames. Waste management company Cory built the facility in 2012, and in 2020 gained Bexley’s permission to expand it.
Keen to demonstrate
the incinerator’s cleanness, Cory agreed to finance air-quality monitoring stations around its site. And so we have Belvedere, Belvedere
West and Slade Green sites in the northeast of the borough.
In addition to the three owned-by-Bexley,
paid-by-Cory sites, Bexley “piggybacks” on two monitoring stations that belong to Greenwich
and sit on two major roads as they cross into Bexley. The Falconwood site “watches” A2, while the Sidcup Fiveways site records
air-pollution
levels on A20. In total we get five monitoring stations, two on busy motorways (Sidcup and Falconwood) and three in residential areas
(Belvedere and Slade Green). What numbers do we see? Read Part 7 to find out. [Collective groan]
Links
London Air
https://www.londonair.org.uk/LondonAir/Default.aspx
WHO Global Air Quality Guidelines 2021
https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/345329/9789240034228-eng.pdf
“Damning New Report Shatters 'Scientific' Claims Made By London Mayor Khan”
https://togetherdeclaration.org/ulez/
“Rainham MP ends campaign against Belvedere incinerator plans”
https://www.romfordrecorder.co.uk/news/21478258.rainham-mp-ends-campaign-belvedere-incinerator-plans/
Bexley council: “ULEZ - Member Task and Finish work”
https://bexley.public-i.tv/core/portal/webcast_interactive/743567/start_time/9752000
“ULEZ: West London garage owner fears expansion of £12.50 zone will reduce value of his 27-year-old business by £300,000 and ‘financially ruin him’”
https://www.mylondon.news/news/south-london-news/london-ulez-west-london-garage-26284874
“Builder says he’ll lose £3,000 over Ulez which ‘tradesmen can’t afford’”
https://metro.co.uk/2023/02/27/builder-says-hell-lose-3000-over-ulez-that-tradesmen-cant-afford-18355914/
ULEZ Protest in Orpington, by Brown Car Guy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twGjux08IMg
ULEZ Protest in Bromley, by Brown Car Guy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NaiAH7Gq4yI&t=1035s