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News and Comment February 2023

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7 February - Thinking about ULEZ, Part 3 - People Will Talk

Another guest post from @tonyofsidcup.


The last paragraph of my previous post said:

“Well, 59% or 68%, no matter - clearly, majority of Londoners oppose ULEZ, and that’s why Khan ought to cancel ULEZ!” No, and no. This is actually the key point in the whole ULEZ consultation business, and one that Fortune and Friends try hardest to avoid. Let’s hit it on the head in the next post.

This is the next post, and this is the big, two-pronged lie: the average Londoner opposes ULEZ, and Sadiq Khan improperly overruled the public opinion to push through his unpopular policy. In reality, the average Londoner favours ULEZ - the average Inner Londoner, already within ULEZ so unaffected by the expansion, favours it, while the average Outer Londoner gives you a different answer depending on how you ask - so Mayor Khan is going with the public opinion, not against it.

If you watch on YouTube the exchange between Sadiq Khan and Peter Fortune at Mayor’s Question Time (see Links below), you will hear the mayor repeatedly say: “A consultation is not a referendum”. To me, it means three things.

First, it is about the decision-maker. With a referendum, the voters decide: before votes are cast, people agree that the choice with the most votes will be implemented. With a consultation, it is the body that sponsors the consultation that makes the call. There is no commitment to go with the most popular choice.

Second, it is about the purpose. A referendum aims to reveal the most popular choice and to produce a decision. A consultation aims to draw out the arguments “for” and “against” and to inform a decision. Recall those group emails, the subject of #TheUlezScandal version 1. 5,000 people saying “no” in a referendum is 5,000 votes. 5,000 people emailing identical text to consultation organisers is merely one set of arguments repeated 5,000 times. (If there are any arguments advanced at all).

Third, it is about representativeness. A typical referendum captures a large fraction of the voter population, and is accepted as representative. If, for example, Bexley Conservatives get 51% of the votes in the 2022 election - “decisive victory”, according to Teresa O’Neill - we accept that the share of voting-age Bexleyites favouring Tories is close to 51%. A typical consultation involves a much smaller fraction of eligible voters, and tends to attract people with strong views (enough motivation to complete a questionnaire), leaving out the crucial, broad middle. For this reason, “projecting” the consultation-produced percentages of “ayes” and “noes” on a particular yes-or-no question to the entire population is a terrible idea. You want to gauge whole-population “for” and “against” percentages, but a consultation gives you those for “strongly for” and “strongly against”. The two sets are completely different, and may point in opposite directions.

(Statisticians talk about “self-selected” surveys, and “self-selection bias”. The self-selection bias is distinct from the normal statistical uncertainty, when you estimate “population” quantities based on a sample. The latter is less of a problem: the wonder of statistics is exactly that you *can* reliably extrapolate from a sample. The catch is that your sample needs to be representative, or “unbiased”. A “good” sample of 1,000 people will let you make decent predictions about a population of millions. A “bad” sample with 100,000 people will be worthless).

With this in mind, let’s have a look at the ULEZ consultation. First, Mayor Khan never promised to follow the majority opinion. One can accuse Khan of not making “Do you support ULEZ or not?” the consultation’s question 1, but maybe that’s a difference between a single-question referendum and a many-questions consultation. A respondent could express their rejection of ULEZ in Question 13 - “We are proposing to expand the ULEZ London-wide on 29 August 2023. What do you think of the implementation date?” - by choosing “Should not be implemented”. Discussion of feedback received through the consultation is presented in AECOM’s report to the mayor and runs to dozens of pages, with a number of specific ULEZ plan changes linked to that feedback. To claim that the City Hall dismissed the consultation input would be disingenuous.

Finally, the question of how representative the consultation sample was of London’s population - and just to clarify, a fair proportion of responses came from outside London - can be answered with a single chart from that report, showing that 42% of respondents were owners of non-compliant cars from Outer London.
Status Types
Figuring out this group’s share in London’s population is tricky, but it is abundantly clear that it is not close to 40% - my guess, based on Bexley data, would be 10-15%. (Note the distinction between individuals and households, and remember the households without cars). It is accurate to say that 68% of ULEZ consultation respondents opposed ULEZ. It is, however, grossly misleading to say - as GLA Conservatives did - that 68% of Londoners voted against ULEZ.


Types To gauge the average Londoner’s stance on ULEZ, you need proper surveys. Only two have been done, both by YouGov, the market-leading polling agency established by the former chancellor of ill repute Nadhim Zahawi.

The first survey was commissioned by the GLA (i.e. the City Hall, or Khan if you like), ran in July, and repeated the consultation’s Question 13:
We are proposing to expand the ULEZ London-wide on 29 August 2023. What do you think of the implementation date?


● It should be implemented, but at an earlier date
● It should be implemented at the proposed date
● It should be implemented, but at a later date
● It should not be implemented
● Don’t know


The second survey, done in November, was commissioned by GLA Conservatives and had this text: To generate additional revenue for Transport for London, the Mayor of London is proposing to expand the Ultra-Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) to a wider area than it currently is. This means non-compliant vehicles have to pay a £12.50 daily charge for driving within Greater London. Do you think the Ultra-Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) should or should not be expanded?


● It should be expanded
● It should not be expanded
● Don’t know


The Tory-commissioned survey employs a “leading question”, suggesting a specific motivation for ULEZ expansion: “to generate revenue”. This is not an honest polling practice, but it is a very effective one, which is why it is used.

 SurveyThe two polls have produced very different results. In the Tory poll, 51% oppose ULEZ (“Decisive victory!”, says Teresa O’Neill), and 34% support it. In the GLA poll, 51% of Londoners support ULEZ (“Decisive victory!” says Teresa O’Neill again, looking a little confused), while 27% oppose it. In essence, you get opposite results. For Outer London only, the GLA poll has 46% “for” against 34% “against”; the Tory poll has 59% “against” and 29% “for”. The truth is somewhere in between.

Personally, I think that it is closer to the GLA numbers - because the Tory poll was so manipulatively worded, it should be “down-weighted” - but you may disagree and move the mark closer to the middle. I think we both will conclude that ULEZ is the winner in Inner London, and in Outer London the split is near 50/50.

So there you have it. GLA Tories’ allegations of #TheULEZScandal are worthless - a ”smokescreen”, as Sadiq Khan put it, a deception aimed at the vast majority of people with zero interest in learning the details. The percentage of anti-ULEZ responses to the consultation’s Question 13 was predictable in advance, and, because of this, irrelevant to the decision-maker, i.e. the mayor. Limited polling showed support for ULEZ in Inner London, and neutral or moderately anti-ULEZ sentiment (concentrated among older and less educated voters, already undisposed towards Khan) in Outer London. Under the circumstances, both an idealist and a cynic would advise the mayor to proceed with his plan, and so he did.

What would a scientist say, though? Never mind the prone-to-manipulation public opinion - is ULEZ expansion a good idea on public-health grounds? Before we tackle that million-dollar question, let’s devote the next, short post to a falsehood that has circulated within the anti-ULEZ discourse and was recently shared, on the pages of The Telegraph, by one of Sidcup’s finest minds, Gareth Bacon MP.


Links
A good article discussing ULEZ consultation and polls
https://bylinetimes.com/2023/01/23/driver-lobbyist-group-targeting-sadiq-khan-over-clean-air-plans-is-funded-by-road-haulage-industry/
AECOM “Report to Mayor on ULEZ expansion and future Road User Charging proposal” (analysis of consultation responses)
https://haveyoursay.tfl.gov.uk/15619/widgets/58629/documents/34558
ULEZ survey commissioned by GLA, July 2022
https://ehq-production-europe.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/1756f85d90ec076d413af3d3c7132d9f
ULEZ survey commissioned by GLA Conservatives, November 2022. (Summary only)
https://docs.cdn.yougov.com/n7yjacvt7e/GLAConsResults_221115_LondonULEZ_W.pdf

 

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