On Station Road in Chingford, it is not hard to find people with strong opinions about Ulez (the ultra low emissions zone that was extended to London’s outer boroughs on Tuesday). What is more difficult to locate is someone with a car that does not meet the emissions standards and is therefore liable for the daily £12.50 charge for driving in the zone.
According to Transport for London (TfL), more than 90% of cars in outer London are Ulez-compliant. But not having to pay the charge doesn’t dampen individual opposition to it. Driks Georgiou runs Barber Driks hairdressers and drives an Ulez-compliant car. He abhors the scheme. “It’s unacceptable,” he says. “It’s a massive scam. Electric cars cause more pollution than petrol and diesel cars. That’s a fact.”
Like most who express anti-Ulez sentiments, Georgiou doesn’t explicitly condone the so-called “blade runners”, who have been disabling Ulez cameras around the capital’s perimeter – it is claimed that one in four new cameras have been vandalised. “It’s none of my business,” he says. “If they’re doing it, they’re doing it. Good luck to them.”
The local Conservative MP, Iain Duncan Smith, seemed to support the blade runners when he was quoted last week in the Daily Mail – during the government’s “crime week” – saying he was “happy” for constituents to cement up cameras or put plastic bags over them, “because they are facing an imposition no one wants”. He later said on X (formerly Twitter) that he did not condone lawbreaking but did “understand the frustration people feel” about Ulez.
The frustration is often genuine. Chingford resident Roger Heales bought a diesel car when the government was subsidising diesel, for its supposed lower CO2 emissions. “We got screwed on that,” he says. He now has an Ulez-compliant car, “but how long will it be compliant for?” He wants money invested in public transport. “If you want to get people out of their cars, then improve the transport system,” he says.
Sadiq Khan, the London mayor, says he’s doing exactly that. He has already announced “the biggest expansion ever in outer London of the bus network”.
Others, like Dean Palumbo, see Ulez as a money-making scheme to fill the “black hole” in TfL finances. If you’re going to stop polluting cars, they should be banned, not charged, he argues. Palumbo is “not a fan” of Khan, who is seen in outer boroughs as Mr Ulez.
In fact the scheme, aimed at reducing air pollution, was announced by Boris Johnson when he was London mayor. Khan, his successor, brought it in 18 months early in April 2019. The zone then expanded to the North and South Circular roads in October 2021, and finally extended across all of Greater London on 29 August, making it the world’s largest pollution-charging area.
The first two stages passed off with barely a whisper of complaint. It’s the third stage, the deployment across the suburban outer boroughs, where supporters are in the minority, that has turned Ulez into a political issue.
In no small part that was due to the Uxbridge and South Ruislip byelection in July, called when Johnson resigned. Against the national trend, the Tories held the seat with a campaign that focused on opposition to Ulez expansion.
Afterwards, the Labour leader, Keir Starmer, said: “I don’t think there’s any doubt that Ulez was the reason that we lost.” He aimed critical comments in Khan’s direction for “disproportionately” impacting people during a cost of living crisis.
But Khan is a circus master with only a couple of acts. One of few areas of mayoral power in the capital is transport policy. Having been rather anonymous during Covid, and largely ineffective in combating knife crime, he has stuck to his guns on Ulez, even if, as he has in effect admitted, it costs Labour votes at the next election. That particular equation is right now being run through the two main parties’ calculators. One senior Tory was quoted last week saying that green policies have become “the internal culture war where Brexit used to be”.
There are groups organising on social media that, taking a leaf out of the Brexit playbook, present Ulez as a conspiracy by the political class inflicted on the powerless. They see Ulez as the first stage towards pay-by-the-mile charging – the roads minister, Richard Holden, first made this claim after meeting Khan, though City Hall has strenuously denied any such plan.
Protesters also question the effectiveness of Ulez. Khan has claimed a 50% reduction in air toxicity – largely nitrogen dioxide. Protesters point to a 2021 study that found just a 3% drop in NO2 across London, although it was based on the first stage of Ulez, which covered the inner London congestion zone.
In reality, there hasn’t been a conspiracy so much as a political consensus on cleaner air, at least until recently. After all, Ulez is a response to targets in the government’s 25-year environment plan.
How those targets are reached is down to local government, but some areas have received more central government help than others. As Joss Garman, the executive director of the European Climate Foundation, noted after the byelection: “Uxbridge, and other areas around London, were specifically prevented from accessing funding for diesel scrappage schemes by ministers who presumably spied an opportunity to weaponise Ulez to hurt Labour.”
In other words, the government could have smoothed Ulez’s introduction but, as Garman says, “they have no incentive to invest before the elections next year, especially as it is Labour mayors who are taking the heat over clean air”.
Indeed, Rishi Sunak has blamed Khan for poor timing and implementation, and seeks to use the mayor to attack Starmer. Some observers are concerned it’s a political manoeuvre that might be adopted for other green policies, particularly the government’s net zero commitment. Already there are noises from government circles about going too far, too fast, and it is under pressure from 40 Tory MPs and peers for the ban on new petrol and diesel cars from 2030 to be put back.
Ulez represents an opportunity to build a protest movement against carbon reduction and green initiatives. Beyond political desperation, it’s not clear what purpose that would serve for the government. “Most climate polices will save money for households because they’re about reducing everyone’s exposure to the impact of shockingly expensive gas and oil imports,” says Garman. “That’s why the Office for Budget Responsibility has estimated that it will be twice as expensive if we don’t hit net zero.”
Nonetheless we live in strange times, when rational arguments, no matter how well supported by evidence, can be vanquished by highly emotive, fact-light, campaigns. Sunak is playing a dangerous game if he seeks to profit from such forces. If – or more likely, when – he loses power, the Tory party could conceivably break from the climate consensus.
Even the former prime minister’s father, Stanley Johnson, not renowned for wise counsel, has warned it would be “really, really crazy” for the government to backtrack on environmental commitments, including Ulez.
Back in Chingford, Joe Ebbasi agrees. “I think it’s necessary,” he says, “no matter how painful it is.” But his father, he says, believes Ulez “to be a punitive taxation with an ulterior agenda … but he thinks that generally about the world anyway.”
The focus on London obscures the problems faced in places that don’t enjoy its exceptional (for the UK) public transport. A recent chart in the Financial Times showed that Britain is more poorly served by public transport than any other wealthy western nation, including the US.
That ought to inspire a protest movement, but public transportseldom captures the imagination with the force that most potent of cultural symbols, the car, is able to assert.
Anyway, a lot of people dispute the idea that cars are the problem. “Go down in the underground and see what you breathe in there,” says Billy, who drives a black cab. “You come out and blow your nose and you’ve got all black shit up there.”
Further along the traffic-laden road, Tatiana Powell is inclined to agree. “England is very good with pollution. There are very good cars here. I come from Russia, where there are very old cars and the pollution is bad.” She is also against Ulez.
