8 January - Thinking about ULEZ, Part 1 - Men of Honour
When Bonkers started in 2009 it tried to present the facts and where
appropriate both sides of the argument and leave readers to draw their own
conclusions. Bexley Council was then at the height of its dishonest phase and
there wasn’t really any need to point out the obvious with opinions. Over the
intervening years BiB’s original tagline of Dishonest, Incompetent, Vindictive;
stolen from The News Shopper, has become less appropriate than it used to be.
One subject upon which Bonkers has not been fence fitting is Sadiq Khan.
Councillor John Davey (Independent, West Heath) once said that Khan was doing
more damage to our capital city than the Luftwaffe in 1940. In the sense that London was
able to recover from the Blitz but is unlikely to survive the Khanage of the past few years, the former Conservative Councillor was right.
However
there is a minority view (the disregarded ULEZ consultation confirms it) that Khan is some sort of Super Hero for his blinkered
attack on the city’s economy which ignores various reports that he will do
almost nothing for air pollution. The reductions have come and will continue to
come naturally. There was a 94% reduction in pollution between 2016 and 2020 (Imperial
College figures) as older vehicles are replaced.
Because I am interested in how contrary views are justified the first of a
multi-part analysis by @tonyofsidcup is published below. It is unedited although I personally feel
some discomfort at the way the premature death of James Brokenshire from lung cancer has been used as supporting material.
His loss cannot sensibly be used to justify ULEZ in the way that smoking
was restricted following the death of entertainer Roy Castle whose demise was
blamed on performing in smoky environments. Polluting vehicles will be gone
within a very few years with or without Khanage. Smoking is still killing people
29 years after non-smoker Castle died from lung cancer.
Note: Photos above from my own collection.
The premature death, from lung cancer, of the Old Bexley and Sidcup MP James
Brokenshire shocked his friends and acquaintances among Bexley Conservatives. So it came as no
surprise that when in 2022 London’s mayor Sadiq Khan proposed to expand the capital’s Ultra Low
Emission Zone to include Bexley, the local party rallied behind the plan. “I welcome the
mayor’s efforts to clean up London’s air”, Brokenshire’s successor Louie French stated, “We simply
cannot tolerate avoidable deaths from respiratory disease”. Sidcup Ward councillor Richard Diment
reminded his colleagues that a 2021 study by Imperial College London named his ward London’s
worst-affected by air
pollution in terms of lives lost. “As the Cabinet Member for Education, I
regularly meet with the borough’s parents. I simply could not look them in the eye if I failed to support ULEZ”, he said.
Falconwood and Welling councillor Frazer Brooks agreed: “Living next to A2,
my constituents suffer from the borough’s highest levels of NO2 pollution, and it would be
unthinkable for me to oppose ULEZ expansion”. Councillor Smith of St Mary’s and St James Ward mentioned
his post as the communications director of the national Conservative Environment Network,
and said: “We may disagree with the mayor on many things, but protecting Londoners’ health is
our common priority. Yes, times are tough and everyone is feeling the pinch, but you cannot tell
an asthmatic child “Sorry, it was too expensive to give you clean air”.
“For me, it is a matter of Conservative principles”, Council Leader Teresa
O’Neill remarked, “A true Conservative is serious about personal responsibility. If your vehicle
pollutes the air that other people breathe, you accept your duty and pick up the bill. I would do this
readily”. Councillor O’Neill recalled that back in 2007, the council declared the borough an Air Quality
Management Area, citing high levels of nitrogen-dioxide and
particulate-matter pollution. “Air
quality has been Bexley Conservatives’ priority since day 1”, she said, “Every year, the Cabinet
debates the annual Air Quality Action Plan, and we always ask: What more can we do to make our air cleaner?”
Ok, let’s snap out of this daydream. All of the quotes above are made up.
Without exception, Bexley Tories have toed the party line and opposed ULEZ expansion, not once
acknowledging Bexley residents living with respiratory disease. (Clearly, Brokenshire was an
exception). The “green” Councillor Smith read out an anti-ULEZ statement in the council chamber.
After Mayor Khan announced, in November 2022, that ULEZ expansion was going ahead, Bexley
joined Tory-run Outer London boroughs of Croydon, Harrow and Hillingdon in opposition. In her
statement, Teresa O’Neill insisted that the “decisive” victory of Bexley Conservatives in the May 2022
local election - Tories’ 51% of votes vs. Labour’s 44% - gave the council the mandate to oppose ULEZ.
(In the following month, the “rebel alliance” indicated that it was going to
block TfL’s installation of ULEZ camera equipment on borough-managed roads. One wonders if, defying TfL,
the councils would be able to keep the money they receive from TfL. Each year, Bexley receives
hundreds of thousands of pounds from the City Hall, to fund things from bridge repair to the
salaries of lollipop people. In 2020, in a Covid-related development, TfL funding went away, for six months.
So did the lollipops, as Bexley failed to pony up).
A late-2022
Freedom of Information request for Bexley’s latest Air Quality
Action Plan was met, incredibly, with “We don’t have one yet”. Why “incredibly”? The Bexley Air Quality Management
Area has been in place for 15 years, and devising and maintaining an AQAP is, to all appearances, a
legal requirement. One can only wonder if Bexley is breaking the law (and
Defra doesn’t care), or if the senior officer who responded to the FOI did not have a clue. Either way,
it tells you something about the council’s - and its Conservative leadership’s - attention to air
quality. Asking these people to react to the ICL study that put Sidcup, Bexleyheath, Crook Log and
Blackfen and Lamorbey in the top 20 of London’s wards most affected by air pollution seems to be a pointless exercise.
As confirmed by another FOI request, Bexley did not carry out a formal
analysis of the impact of ULEZ expansion before publishing anti-ULEZ articles in The Bexley Magazine, and
did not even ask TfL how many Bexley-registered vehicles would be caught out by ULEZ. (I did - and
was shocked to find that just over half of Bexley vans were non-compliant).
Two Sidcup residents and stars of the Bexley Conservative scene, Louie
French MP and Gareth Bacon MP, made YouTube speeches against ULEZ expansion, and ran
HQ-supplied
anti-ULEZ petitions on their HQ-supplied web sites. Louie never answered an email question about a
claim in one of his anti-ULEZ videos. In fairness, he never answered any question I have emailed
him - while a made-up “Fluke Kelso” received a prompt response to his adoring email. Our MP
appears to operate a “black list” of undeserving constituents. If I weren’t on it, I could ask Louie
about AQAP - after all, as Bexley’s Cabinet Member for Growth, he was likely responsible for it before moving to Westminster.
Most of the anti-ULEZ noise has appeared to originate with the Conservative
members of the London Assembly. There is a Russian expression about someone “getting fired from
the Gestapo for cruelty”; adapting this saying to British realities, I could say that most Tory
Assembly members could be fired from Boris Johnson’s cabinet for lying. The small group spent months
inflating what they called #ULEZScandal, based on a set of falsehoods which spread across the Tory
anti-ULEZ discourse. In the next post, let’s look at some of these lies.
55% of light commercial vehicles registered in Bexley are not ULEZ compliant.
Seven years ago pollution levels on Bexley were not especially good.
I promised myself that I would avoid further comment so will confine myself to saying that Louie French should seriously consider firing his office assistant.
25 January - Thinking about ULEZ, Part 2 - Soldier of Fortune
Below
is the long awaited Part 2 of @tonyofsidcup’s continued defence of the imposition of the ULEZ Tax on our green and pleasant outer London boroughs.
Two things have happened in the ULEZ Universe
since the previous post.
First, the Tory-controlled Harrow council and the LibDem Sutton announced
that they formally declined TfL’s request to facilitate installation of ULEZ
cameras on borough-managed roads.
Bexley promptly joined the group. “We have
withheld permission for the Mayor to put his ULEZ cameras on our street
furniture or work on our roads”, Teresa O’Neill wrote on January 23.
On the same day, however, an Evening Standard article suggested that TfL did
not need councils’ permission to install cameras alongside existing TfL
equipment, the case for two thirds of all planned sites, according to TfL.
Meanwhile, TfL reminded the boroughs that it was their legal responsibility
to comply with the mayor’s Transport Strategy, now including the expanded
ULEZ. (Ever polite, TfL did not say that it was “local implementation” of
that Strategy by London boroughs that got them TfL funding). The
independents of Havering, though unhappy with ULEZ, accepted the point and
promised their co-operation; the Conservatives of Hillingdon, Croydon and
Bromley stayed put, muttering about blocking cameras and suing the City
Hall, but not doing anything visible.
In a second ULEZ-related development, that unique group of people who make
Bexley Conservatives look competent and honest, the Conservatives of the
London Assembly, had a second go at inflating #UlezScandal. Recall that in
September 2022, The Torygraph reported allegations of anti-ULEZ responses
being excluded from the results of the Mayor’s consultation.
By
January 2023, the GLA Tories, led by “our own” Peter Fortune, the
Assembly Member for Bexley and Bromley, used FOI to obtain a 200-page trove
of City Hall emails related to the consultation. They used it to construct a
story of Sadiq Khan anxiously watching the percentage of anti-ULEZ
consultation responses (all the while feigning ignorance of it), seeing the
public opinion go against him, trying to turn the tide by boosting
participation of pro-ULEZ groups, and in the end manipulating the percentage
by removing a chunk of anti-ULEZ responses on a flimsy pretext. This is
essentially the description provided by Peter Fortune himself at the end of
his 32 minute questioning of Sadiq Khan at Mayor’s Question Time, available
on YouTube. I don’t buy it.
It helps to remember that the consultation was run by TfL, but the responses
were analysed by an outside consultancy, AECOM. When Fortune insinuates that
Sadiq Khan threw away anti-ULEZ responses, one can simply counter that
neither the City Hall nor TfL handled the process, and no “smoking gun”
email from a Khan henchperson to AECOM, directing them to take a particular
approach, has ever been produced. AECOM made their own decisions - as they
were supposed to, since avoiding perceptions of bias was the reason
for TfL not doing the work in-house in the first place.
It also helps to remember the consultation’s timeline. The public was consulted for ten weeks, from May 20 until July 29. When Fortune alleges that
Khan was aware of intermediate results in August or September - but refused
to admit it - one answers “So what? The consultation was closed by then, and
Khan could not have influenced it”.
What about the July publicity push for youth participation, Khan’s alleged
manipulation? I accept the Mayor’s explanation that the youth outreach was
appropriate, and see no evidence of it being either special - an AECOM
report referenced later gives a long list of ULEZ-consultation publicity
campaigns - or a panicked response to the public’s rejection of ULEZ, as
insinuated by Fortune. (Fortune’s implicit admission that young people
support ULEZ might sound awkward for him, but hey, we already knew the
Conservatives favour a different demographic).
Khan’s explanation for why he did not disclose seeing the intermediate
analysis results was that only the final report, presented to him on
November 18, was “results”. A sensible answer or evasive word games? I would
cry foul if “intermediate results” were explicitly queried, but if Fortune
et al. had just asked for “results”, I am ready to give Khan a pass. Fortune
may be right, he just does not lay out enough evidence to prove his claim -
and lacks the credibility to be trusted without it.
What about those discarded anti-ULEZ responses, the stuff of the original #UlezScandal?
Let’s understand what it’s about. Imagine that you run an online
survey. You build an online form with, say, twenty questions, including
questions about respondents’ backgrounds, and ask people to fill it out. You
also allow people to email you - and end up with a bunch of emails that skip
all the questions, including the demographic ones, and answer just one.
Now, you need to summarize the responses to your survey. The “proper” survey
responses are “nice and clean” - but how do you handle those emails?
A reasonable approach is to use the information in them where possible:
count the emails with regard to the question they answered, and ignore them
on the questions they themselves ignored. Now, you need to tell people how
many responses you received for each question, and what the split was. Easy
for all but that one question, but what do you do there? To be safe, just
give the reader the full information: tell them how many survey responses
and emails you received, and what the split is if you exclude or include the emails.
… and this is exactly what AECOM did. You can see the details in Section
4.13 of the clunkily-named but extremely interesting “Report to Mayor on
ULEZ expansion and future Road User Charging proposal”. Note that the
percentage of responses choosing “ULEZ should not be implemented” is *higher*
(68% vs. 59%) when those “organised responses” are excluded. That’s some
“manipulation”! In my opinion, only people devoid of any integrity could
look at this and allege wrongdoing. Have I mentioned that GLA Conservatives
make Bexley Conservatives look good?
“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.
AECOM Report.
P.S. One more thing. Section 4.3 of AECOMs report mentions five petitions
(not to be confused with organised email campaigns) submitted to TfL. Not
one, but two of them come from Bexley! The first one, with 245
signatures, appears to be by Bexley Tories. However, there is a second
petition, with just 36 names, saying simply: “Objection to the Mayor of
London’s proposal to extend the Ultra Low Emission Zone London-wide. We
support Bexley Council!” Good for you, folks.
Links
Councils refuse camera installation
https://www.mylondon.news/news/east-london-news/ulez-full-list-london-councils-26018487
Evening Standard: no council permission needed
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/ulez-expansion-council-challenge-cctv-cameras-sadiq-khan-tfl-powers-b1054878.html
Statement by Bexley
https://twitter.com/LBofBexley/status/1617482534530564097
Peter Fortune’s GLA profile
https://www.london.gov.uk/who-we-are/what-london-assembly-does/london-assembly-members/peter-fortune
GLA Conservatives’ YouTube video 1
https://twitter.com/GLAConservative/status/1615319861088980993?s=20&t=Yl6xDA5WskOLnKB61uwgYQ
(Note the email shown at 1:17)
GLA Conservatives’ YouTube video 2 (Fortune vs Khan)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSkSuukO6SU
#UlezScandal 1.0
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2022/09/30/leak-reveals-two-thirds-londoners-oppose-expansion-ultra-low/
AECOM “Report to Mayor on ULEZ expansion and future Road User Charging proposal”
https://haveyoursay.tfl.gov.uk/15619/widgets/58629/documents/34558
More to come.
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.
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.
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.
The
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
15 February - Thinking about ULEZ, Part 4 - A Beautiful Mind
N.B. There is
a composite of all four (so far) of @tonyofsidcup’s ULEZ articles available here assembled into chronological order.
I have always believed in giving both sides of every story whenever possible which may explain why BiB has never been totally Labour or
Conservative supporting. As my MP said to me once, “you a more a plague on all
their houses sort of bloke” and she was right. Having said that I find it
impossible to see any merit in Sadiq Khan’s plan to extend the Ultra Low
Emission Zone to the country lanes of Bromley and in some places beyond the M25. I know all politicians lie but the Mayor takes things to
extremes, misquoting and cherry picking the Imperial College findings for example.
But a promise is a promise, here is the penultimate and unexpurgated episode of @tonyofsidcup’s
eulogy to London’s worst ever Mayor and you can safely assume I agree with very
little of it. I nevertheless found it interesting and learned some things I
didn’t previously know. It is certainly a well researched piece from someone who may once have aspired to drive a Lada or a
Trabant
but he appears to totally ignore the fact that vehicle pollution pollution is rapidly
disappearing anyway and the cameras can only be justified if the plan is London
wide road pricing, something
predicted on Bonkers a long tIme before it became mainstream thinking.
A faint memory of my past life as an American PhD student is attending
lectures by three economics Nobel laureates. Even in the field of Nobelists,
the three were genuine titans who transformed their fields and had a
far-reaching impact on the world. Robert Merton was a founding father of
quantitative finance, celebrated by academics and by Wall Street “quants”
driving the world’s financial-derivatives industry. Robert Lucas was the
world’s pre-eminent macroeconomist, who changed the way economists model the
economy as a whole, and the way governments and central banks think about
managing booms and recessions. Finally, John Nash made a crucial
contribution to game theory - the science of repeated negotiation - and,
even more impressively, was played by Russell Crowe in the 2001 Hollywood
movie “A Beautiful Mind”. The film told the true story of a brilliant
scientist struck in his prime by mental illness (schizophrenia), and
overcoming it after a long, heart-breaking struggle.
I
thought of “A Beautiful Mind” when reading a Telegraph article penned by a
fellow Sidcup resident, Mr Gareth Bacon, the Member of Parliament for
Orpington. As some readers will know, before becoming an MP for a Bromley
constituency in 2019, Mr Bacon had been a councillor for Sidcup’s Longlands
Ward - not just a councillor, but a Bexley Cabinet Member and the Deputy
Leader. I moved to Sidcup in 2017, and did not start paying attention to
local politics until 2020 - there was a local issue, the local councillors
(including Mrs Bacon!) seemed uninterested, I became frustrated but also
curious about the Bexley council, and it snowballed from there - so Mr
Bacon’s Bexley period passed me by. Now, I see occasional, favourable
references to him on the Bonkers blog - for example, he is credited for
Bexley’s recycling prowess. A Google search finds a 2015 Evening Standard
article that names Mr Bacon “the capital’s highest paid councillor”,
collecting £108,000 from four (!) public posts, including his roles at
Bexley and the London Assembly, and being Mayor Boris Johnson’s (oh, the
happy days!) appointed person on the London Fire Brigade.
(The link says “I am worth every penny”, says a £108,000-a-year politician”,
but I don’t see that line in the text. Interestingly, the 2015 article is by Pippa Crerar, who became Britain’s most-talked-about journalist in 2021,
when she ushered in Partygate with a report of a lockdown-breaking
Christmas Party at Downing Street. For good measure, she also brought down
GLA Conservatives’ Shaun Bailey, with a lockdown party of his own. Standing
next to Bailey in an infamous photo was Bexley councillor Adam Wildman).
It
rubbed me up the wrong way when in 2021 Mr Bacon showed up in The Private
Eye’s list of councillors who continued to claim their allowance after
election to Parliament - note whose name comes before his! - while,
according to Bexley Labour, failing to attend council meetings.
These days, I am not overly enthused about Mr Bacon spending £550 of
taxpayer money every month on an assistant to watch his web site and social
media. (Sadly, I was banned by said assistant on Twitter, after jokingly
suggesting that Mr Bacon’s endorsement of Kemi Badenoch in the Conservatives
leadership contest could be a hostage situation, given Mrs Bacon’s
employment in Badenoch’s office). To be perfectly frank, I feel that Mr
Bacon could show a little more restraint when reaching into the taxpayer’s
pocket. At the same time, he strikes me as a highly intelligent man, quite
distant from the Neanderthal wing of Conservative Party, represented by
people like Jonathan Gullis. (Seen sitting next to Mr Bacon and our own Mr
French - patriotically masked - on the image below). This is why what I read in The Telegraph was worrying.
As
far as I know, there are now two Telegraph articles published by
Mr Bacon, with the later one out just yesterday, on February 13. It was the
earlier article from December 27, 2022 that caught my eye. It opened with this:
“Sadiq Khan’s latest plan to make it harder to drive should worry us all.
It’s the worst assault on motorists we’ve ever seen. The London Mayor is
determined to price working people off the roads and has ignored their
overwhelming objections, giving them no choice, time or opportunity to avoid
a ruinous bill. If Mr Khan gets away with this, any other city or regional
mayor can impose reckless driving charges across the country. It must be stopped”.
Let’s look past the “overwhelming objections” bit, the false Tory
claim addressed in the previous post. (It is true that lower-income
respondents in the TfL ULEZ consultation were more opposed to ULEZ than
higher-income ones, but consultation respondents were strikingly
unrepresentative of London’s population in the first place. Mr Bacon is
putting his words in the mouth of the average working-class Londoner). It is
the next sentence that worries me. “If Mr Khan gets away with this, any
other city or regional mayor can impose reckless driving charges across the country”.
What’s wrong with this proposition? Why would the ULEZ expansion
open the floodgates? After all, it is an expansion of an existing ULEZ - a
second expansion, even. Recall that efforts to “price working people off the
roads”, as Mr Bacon puts it, have been made for a long time. The “congestion
charge” was introduced, by Mayor Ken Livingstone, on February 17, 2003,
almost exactly 20 years ago. In 2017, after a record air-pollution spike in
January, Mayor Sadiq Khan enacted the “toxicity charge” in October. Finally,
in 2019, the toxicity charge was replaced by ULEZ. (Wikipedia says that the
plans were made by Mayor Boris Johnson, but I will let you verify the
claim). Who was the leader of GLA Conservatives when T-charge and ULEZ were
introduced? A certain Mr Gareth Bacon. By the time of ULEZ’s first
extension, in 2021, he had vacated his leadership role, but remained an
Assembly Member. Without a doubt, he played an active role in these
developments. Does he not believe those changes to be “the worst assault on
motorists we have ever seen”? Or does he simply not remember?
It is not just events before his move to Westminster that Mr Bacon seems to
have forgotten. The Orpington MP appears to be unaware of high-profile,
controversial policies pursued by his own party.
One can begin the story with the Environment Act of 1995, which committed the UK government to
develop the Air Quality Strategy, last updated in 2007. (To recall the first
post in this series, 2007 is when Bexley Air Quality Management Area was
declared). In 2008, the European Parliament issued the Ambient Air Quality
Directive, imposing binding air-quality limits on EU member states. UK,
alongside some other countries, consistently breached the nitrogen-dioxide
limit, in multiple areas including Greater London, and in 2014 the European
Commission began “infringement procedures” against the UK government, with
the case progressing to the European Court of Justice in 2018. In 2021,
already after Brexit, the court found that the UK government had failed to fulfil its obligations.
By
that time, the government had a legal setback at home as well: in 2015,
the Supreme Court told Whitehall to urgently develop a plan to achieve
compliance with EU’s limits, which became part of the British law. Maybe
this is why in the mid-2010’s, the UK government finally got serious about
air pollution. In 2019, the Clean Air Strategy and the National Air
Pollution Control Programme were published, and year 2021 saw the
Environment Act, which set a number of quantitative targets in areas
including air quality, with particular attention given to the particularly
hazardous (pun intended, though the subject is genuinely grim: this is the
stuff that causes cancers and heart attacks) particulate-matter pollution.
The Office for Environmental Protection was set up - they are the people who
will hopefully be asking Bexley about the missing-for-16-years Bexley Air Quality Action Plan!
Finally,
the Clean Air Zone framework was developed, allowing - indeed,
requiring - councils with high levels of air pollution (mainly NOx, as it is
mainly produced by cars and “stays local”, unlike PM, which comes from
different sources and travels far and wide) to limit polluting car traffic.
One can find online references to “charging” or “non-charging” Clean Air
Zones, but the current CAZ legislation refers only to “charging” CAZs, where
owners of particular vehicles are asked to pay for entering the zone. (A
“non-charging”CAZ is when a council tries to clean up the air without asking
drivers to pay). Within “charging” CAZes, there are different classes,
depending on what types of vehicles are charged. Class D is the one where
“regular” cars, i.e. not taxis, have to pay. Since 2021, a Class D zone
covers much of Birmingham. Since 2022, a Class D zone applies in central
Bristol. Class C zones, “forgiving” to non-taxis, exist in Newcastle,
Sheffield, Bath and Bradford. Notably, in Bristol, the local council tried
to “water down” the CAZ but was overruled by the government! The same thing
is now happening in Manchester (led by Labour’s Andy Burnham) where the
local council has pointed to the cost-of-living crisis and tried to reject a
CAZ, replacing it with a “non-charging” zone. The government has pushed
back, arguing that it wasn’t good enough! The Manchester CAZ did not go
ahead for now, but it is definitely happening.
If
the news from Manchester makes you think “If Manchester managed to
postpone the CAZ, why can’t London postpone the ULEZ expansion?”, I am fine
with that. I would like to draw your attention to a different takeaway. The
UK government - for 13 years now led by the Conservatives - is at long last
serious about air quality and is working to cut car emissions across the
nation. London is leading the way, but is moving as part of a national
trend, a national policy, guided by national targets, some of them distant
(2050), some close (2040), some very close (2030). When Gareth Bacon MP
tells you about Sadiq Khan waging a war on motorists, politely ask him “Are
you forgetting something, Gareth?” and tell him about what you just read.
PS. And do watch “A Beautiful Mind”: Russell Crowe is Australia’s national treasure.
Links
“I can juggle four public posts, says £108,000 a year politician”
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/politics/i-m-worth-every-penny-says-ps108-000ayear-politician-10069317.html
Gareth Bacon’s Wikipedia profile
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gareth_Bacon
London Congestion Charge (Wikipedia)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_congestion_charge
London Ultra Low Emission Zone (Wikipedia)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra_Low_Emission_Zone
UK Air Quality Strategy for England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-air-quality-strategy-for-england-scotland-wales-and-northern-ireland-volume-1
UK infringes on EU air-quality limits, 2014
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_14_154
Supreme Court tells the UK Government to act on air pollution, 2015
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/apr/29/supreme-court-orders-uk-to-draw-up-air-pollution-cleanup-plan
Clean Air Strategy
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/clean-air-strategy-2019
UK National Air Pollution Control Programme
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/air-quality-uk-national-air-pollution-control-programme
Clean Air Zone framework
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/air-quality-clean-air-zone-framework-for-england/clean-air-zone-framework
Clean Air Zones in UK (Wikipedia)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_Air_Zone
Manchester Clean Air Zone postponed
https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/clean-air-zone-charges-highly-26212421
1 March - Thinking about ULEZ, Part 5
No one can doubt the amount of work that has gone into @tonyofsidcup’s contribution to the ULEZ debate but I feel that it is a little short on democracy.
The extended ULEZ was not in Khan’s manifesto. He said he would be mindful of
the consultation but he wasn’t, even if you overlook the disappearance of 5,000 probably dissenting voices.
The timing isn’t right. There is a cost of living crisis and car pollution
levels are rapidly declining. It is a money grab and the expenditure can only be
justified if it is the precursor to road charging which we now know it is.
It wouldn’t be fair to attempt to systematically destroy Tony’s input after offering
him the opportunity to make his research more widely available but even if I accept everything
he says it still comes across as something that might have been written by someone who was schooled in the
U.S.S.R. rather than what used to be a Western democracy.
My own view can perhaps be most simply made clear by this photo montage.
All five of Tony's essays are available here.
Thinking about ULEZ, Part 5 - Gone Girl
Meet Geoff, an up-and-coming YouTuber who has found an enthusiastic audience - 34,700
subscribers and counting! - by recording videos against ULEZ, road charging, LTNs and all that woke
nonsense. In his recent video, Geoff holds out an article by the Centre for London, “London’s
independent think tank”, alluding to the dangers of air pollution. Geoff is not impressed. “As we well
know from Sadiq Khan’s recent actions, he just makes the numbers up as he goes along”, says Geoff,
“If he wants to think that 40,000 people have died from air pollution, then that’s what he says. But
there is no evidence to back it up!” Geoff has evidence of his own, an official document which says,
in black and white: “There was 1 death registered in London in the period 2001 to 2021 which had
exposure to air pollution recorded on the death certificate”. Khan’s lie is spectacularly busted, and Geoff moves on.
We shouldn’t. One thing we can do is put a face on the “one death” statistic. It is the face of a
nine-year-old child, Ella Kissi-Debrah, who lived in Lewisham - five train stops from Sidcup - and died
in 2013, after thirty hospital admissions, where her lungs would fill up with fluid and, on five occasions, collapse.
It
took seven years and two inquests - not to mention incredible perseverance by Ella’s mother
Rosamund - to officially establish the reason for Ella’s deterioration and death. The following
paragraph comes from the coroner’s “Report to Prevent Future Deaths”:
“Ella died at the age of 9. She had severe, hypersecretory asthma causing episodes of respiratory and
cardiac arrest and requiring frequent emergency hospital admissions. On 15 February 2013 she had a
further asthmatic episode at home and was taken to hospital where she suffered a cardiac arrest
from which she could not be resuscitated. Air pollution was a significant contributory factor to both
the induction and exacerbations of her asthma. During the course of her illness between 2010 and
2013 she was exposed to levels of nitrogen dioxide and particulate matter in excess of World Health
Organization Guidelines. The principal source of her exposure was traffic emissions. During this
period there was a recognized failure to reduce the level of nitrogen dioxide to within the limits set
by EU and domestic law which possibly contributed to her death”.
Ella’s was a landmark case: air pollution was recorded on a death certificate for the first time in the
UK, and possibly for the first time in the so called “developed world”. This happened in 2021, the
latest year mentioned in Geoff’s document, so we don’t know if any more air-pollution-linked deaths
have been recorded since. I think we can be pretty sure that deaths like Ella’s had happened before - we just don’t know about them.
It doesn’t particularly matter. Ella’s case was extreme, with a fast, terminal decline of a happy child
living in London - next to a busy road - and a medical history showing correlation between asthma
attacks and Lewisham’s air-pollution levels. In the vast majority of cases, air pollution - especially
particulate-matter pollution, which can pass through the lungs into blood - steals life slowly,
sometimes affecting victim’s respiratory tract - think asthma and respiratory cancers - but as often
producing disease not obviously linked to breathing, such as non-respiratory cancers, heart attacks and strokes.
In 1992, UK’s Department of Health established a scientific advisory panel named Committee on the
Medical Effects of Air Pollutants, or COMEAP. Over the years, COMEAP has investigated toxic air’s
links to specific conditions (for example, bronchitis and dementia), and attempted to quantify its
health impact, focusing on the two key air pollutants, nitrogen dioxide and particulate matter. Several
reports published by COMEAP have suggested the UK-wide annual “mortality burden” (we will
discuss this later) of about 40,000 deaths.
This is where Geoff gets his “40,000 deaths” number. However, it is an estimate for the whole of the
UK, not only for London. The latter can be found in a 2021 study by scientists from Imperial College,
who applied the latest COMEAP methodology to 2019 data for Greater London’s 600-plus wards.
The ICL study has a special significance for Sidcup, as it named Sidcup Ward, jointly with the
neighbouring Bickley Ward of Bromley, London’s worst in terms of mortality burden. (To the relief of
local estate agents, Sidcup is not explicitly named in the paper. I made a FOI request to TfL to get
ward-level numbers, which identified Sidcup and Bickley as the joint Number 1). Three more Bexley
wards - Bexleyheath, Crook Log, Blackfen and Lamorbey - made it to Top 20. (One would think that
the esteemed News Shopper takes note. Nope. Maybe it’s the estate-agent lobby after all).
The first bullet point in the study’s “key findings” says: “In 2019, in Greater London, the equivalent of
between 3,600 to 4,100 deaths […] were estimated to be attributable to human-made PM2·5 and
NO2, considering that health effects exist even at very low levels. This calculation is for deaths from all
causes including respiratory, lung cancer and cardiovascular deaths”.
The calculation hangs on estimated “hazard rates”. Broadly, a hazard rate answers the question “How
much more likely is one to die if exposed to bad thing X?” A hazard rate “embeds” a specific time
horizon (e.g., one year), and, in the case of air pollution, is defined with regard to a specific
concentration of a specific pollutant. (Things get tricky when two or more pollutants “overlap”).
Notably, a hazard rate deals only with life and death; a temporary or permanent impairment of one’s
quality of life - consider living with asthma - is out of the picture, as long as one is alive.
What Geoff wants you to believe is that for air pollution, that hazard rate is essentially zero: with a
single death in two decades, in a city as big as London, there is really nothing to worry about!
Scientists have a very different view, and guess an about 05%-2% boost in one’s “natural” risk of
death over 1 year per 10 micrograms-per-cubic-metre (let me abbreviate this to “mgcm”) of nitrogen
dioxide, and an about 4-8% (6% is a popular number) boost in one’s “natural” risk of death over 1
year per 10 mgcm of fine particulate matter (PM2·5). The numbers come from several large
international (mostly American) epidemiological studies, and this is the closest we come to
“evidence” demanded by Geoff. It is not the kind of evidence that one can touch, but in science, this is not unusual.
(Is 10 mgcm a realistic level experienced by a Londoner - in particular, an Outer Londoner living far
from Zone 1? Consider Bexley’s Belvedere, where an air-quality monitoring station located in a
residential area registered on average 8 mgcm for PM2·5 and 23 mgcm for NO2 for 2023. So yes, 10
mgcm of PM2·5 or NO2 is not a high bar for London, Inner or Outer. It can be double, or triple, or
quadruple that - and that means multiplied risks!)
With hazard-rate estimates in hand, one can estimate the expected number of deaths assuming a
particular air-pollution level. Consider two points: the current air-pollution level, and the air-pollution
level assuming no human-made air pollution. Say, 200 Sidcup Ward residents are expected to die in
the “high pollution” scenario, and 190 people are expected to die in the “low pollution” scenario.
The difference (10) is the estimated mortality burden. Summed across London wards, one gets 4,000
premature deaths. (Not all of them are preventable. To calculate how many deaths a particular
clean-air policy can prevent - or rather postpone to their “normal” times - one needs to make a
forecast of the policy’s impact on air quality and use the resulting air-pollution level for a separate calculation).
In the end, there are no 4,000 death certificates with “air pollution” written on them. “4,000 deaths”
is an estimate made by a scientific study that used an accepted national methodology and
mainstream quantitative assumptions. As any estimate, this one can be off the mark, in either
direction. However, it is scientists’ best guess. Sadiq Khan and clean-air campaigners do not mislead
the public when they talk about 4,000 Londoners dying every year due to air pollution. Geoff and
people like Geoff - sadly, including Conservative politicians on the Bexley council, on the London
Assembly and in Parliament - do mislead the public when they discount the danger that air pollution
presents. Much worse, they (excluding Geoff this time) fail to act when inaction costs lives.
And speaking of Parliament… Ten years after Ella’s death, the Clean Air (Human Rights) Bill,
nicknamed Ella’s Law, sits on the waiting list at the House of Commons,
after approval by the House of Lords. It may get to a vote in late March. Which way do you think our MP
Louie French, who records anti-ULEZ videos and declares that “ULEZ is not about air quality” -
and was Bexley’s Cabinet Member for Growth while the council ignored its responsibility to develop
and act on an Air Quality Action Plan - is going to vote? I encourage you to email Louie at
louie.french.mp@parliament.uk and ask, before he jets off on another expenses-paid fact-finding journey. Some
facts worth finding, like Sidcup’s top spot in a grim league table, are right here.
Health impact of air pollution is a complicated subject, and this essay could only scratch the surface.
If you wish to learn why the World Health Organisation and the British government agree on air
pollution being the top environmental health hazard of our time, you can Google COMEAP and WHO
reports. In the next post, we will look at ULEZ’s ability to improve the situation.
Links
Ella Kissi-Debrah
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/dec/16/ella-kissi-debrah-mother-fight-justice-airpollution-death
Rosamund Kissi-Debrah
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosamund_Kissi-Debrah
Coroner’s “Report to Prevent Future Deaths”
https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Ella-Kissi-Debrah-2021-0113-1.pdf
Committee on the Medical Effects of Air Pollutants (COMEAP)
https://www.gov.uk/government/groups/committee-on-the-medical-effects-of-air-pollutants-comeap
COMEAP again
https://ukwin.org.uk/resources/health/committee-on-the-medical-effects-of-air-pollutants-comeap/
COMEAP, “The mortality effects of long-term exposure to particulate matter
air pollution in the UK”, 2010
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/comeap-mortality-effects-of-long-term-exposure-to-particulate-air-pollution-in-the-uk
Imperial College London, “London Health Burden of Current Air Pollution and
Future Health Benefits
of Mayoral Air Quality Policies”, 2021
http://erg.ic.ac.uk/research/home/resources/ERG_ImperialCollegeLondon_HIA_AQ_LDN_11012021.pdf
Ella’s Law
https://ellaslaw.uk
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
5 May - Thinking about ULEZ, Part 7 - The Endgame
Before Part 7 of @tonyofsidcup’s dissection of the opposition to Khan’s new car tax the usual word of dissent…
I am quite pleased to know one of the ULEZ rebels who a couple of months ago asked me
if there was any danger of electrocution from snipping a cable or two. I was
able to give reassurance that professional grade security cameras operate on 48
volt DC, so wear gloves but the worst you would get is a not too severe jolt.
In the end of
the previous post, we talked about Bexley’s air-quality monitoring stations, and were
going to check just how clean Bexley’s air is. Before we do that, let’s think about what “clean” means.
Recall that discussions of air quality tend to focus on two pollutants - nitrogen dioxide and
particulate matter. The two “villains” are very different in their origin, behaviour and impact.
Nitrogen dioxide is mainly produced by combustion engines, “stays local”, and hits the lungs.
Scientists’ best guess is that long-term exposure to NO2 increases one’s chances of dying in the next
year by 1-2% for every 10 micrograms-per-cubic-metre (“mgcm”) of NO2 concentration. Particulate
matter has more sources - motor vehicles are an important one, but not as dominant as with NO2 -
travels far and wide, and affects both respiratory and cardiovascular health, as smaller PM particles
(2·5 microns is the established cut-off, hence “PM2·5”) can pass from the lungs into the bloodstream.
Scientists think that every 10 mgcm of PM2.5 exposure raises one’s “hazard rate” by 6-8%. (To
provide some reassurance after this morbid talk, one’s “baseline” hazard rate - the chance of dying in
the next year - reaches 1% only after 70. That tiny number gets multiplied by 1·02 or 1·06, etc.)
In 2005 and again in 2021, the World Health Organization published a set of “guidelines” for NO2 and
PM pollution levels. They are 10 mgcm for NO2 and 5 mgcm for PM2·5. A guideline level answers the
question: “Based on what we know, what is the lowest pollution level that, with long exposure,
affects health?” To clarify, a value below a guideline level does not mean that “everything is good”, it
just means “We don’t have enough proof that it is bad”. Likewise, a value above the limit does not
mean that “everything is bad”: the higher the pollution level, the higher the hazard rate. In the end,
there is no “clean” and “not clean”, only “less clean” and “more clean”.
And now, finally, the Bexley numbers. Please review the charts below. Note that red lines stand for
roadside monitoring sites, and green lines denote residential settings. What are we to make of this? I
see two main take-aways.
Everywhere we look, measured NO2 and PM2·5 pollution levels exceed the WHO guidelines - about
10 mgcm too high for NO2, and about 5 mgcm too high for PM2·5. (It sounds more dramatic if we
express the gap in relative terms: for both NO2 and PM2·5, the Bexley levels are double the WHO
guidelines). If these values were fixed long-term, this would mean a Bexley resident’s hazard rate to
be elevated by about 5%. However, they definitely haven’t been fixed - and so we get to the next finding.
(Someone like Gareth Bacon, waxing lyrical about the meadows of Biggin Hill, ought to notice that
PM2ܕ5 pollution levels are essentially the same next to a highway and in a residential neighbourhood.
As noted earlier, particulate matter travels far and wide. There’s a very good chance that if PM2·5
were measured in Biggin Hill - it hasn’t; as we know from Part 6, London’s largest borough has a
single monitoring site - the reading wouldn’t be particularly low).
Both NO2 and PM2·5 charts display a clear downward trend. Should it continue, it looks like WHO
guidelines will be reached within a few years, maybe by 2030.
“Will they, even without ULEZ?” is the million-dollar question. Here, we get into guesswork territory.
My guess is that they will. On the other hand, I believe that the ULEZ expansion will *ensure* that
they do, and drive pollution to an even lower level. (What about the Independent Impact
Assessment commissioned by TfL, which forecast only a negligible air-quality impact? The forecast
applied only to the first 12 months, whereas the policy’s effect will develop over many years).
If the trajectory of pollution levels is permanently shifted downward, and not just short-term but
long-term exposure to NO2 and PM2·5 is reduced, we “slide down” the
hazard-rate curve and save
lives. Importantly, we save them year after year, whereas the costs of ULEZ expansion are largely
transient. Accumulated over many years, even a tiny public-health improvement eventually compensates for the initial pain.
“Easy for you to say - it’s not your pain. You are not an already-struggling
low-income worker facing
an extra £300 pm expense”. I have no comeback to that, and pointing to the Tories who refused to
fund a bigger scrappage scheme (or develop public transport and “active travel”, or generally
promote the clean-air agenda - looking at you, Bexley Tories) would be a deflection tactic. It is what it
is. ULEZ creates winners and losers. If you are on the winning side, you want the blow on the losers
to be softened. Unfortunately, the Tory politicians in charge have opposite incentives, hoping to
convert suffering into votes.
So that’s my “defence of the Red Dictator”, as the gracious host of this series introduced it, done. We
may have reached the end with our views unchanged, but we definitely have learned something new.
Links
World Health Organisation, Global Air Quality Guidelines, 2021
https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/345329/9789240034228-eng.pdf
COMEAP, “Mortality Effects of Long-Term Exposure to Particulate Air Pollution in UK”
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/304641/COMEAP_mortality_effects_of_long_term_exposure.pdf