Lowri Griffiths on Clean Air, Car Ownership, and the Politics of Environmental Policy That Inconveniences People Who Vote

Reported by Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.

By Lowri Griffiths | North London Life & Commentary

I will say something that makes me unpopular with approximately half my social circle: the Ultra Low Emission Zone is correct. The air quality data supports it. The health evidence supports it. The direction of urban transport policy in every city that is taking air quality seriously supports it. I say this as someone who owns a 2009 Vauxhall Astra that is very much within the ULEZ charge zone, that costs me £12.50 every time I drive it in zones where I most need to drive it, and that I am not replacing anytime soon because the market for second-hand non-compliant cars has become interesting and the market for used compliant cars has become expensive in ways that were entirely predictable and that the ULEZ policy designers apparently decided were acceptable externalities.

The argument against the ULEZ expansion is not primarily environmental. Nobody is seriously arguing that London’s air is fine. The argument is distributional: the charge falls hardest on people who can least afford to replace their vehicles, concentrated in outer London boroughs where public transport alternatives are weakest and car ownership is highest. This is a genuine and serious objection to the policy’s implementation. It is not an objection to the policy’s objective. The two things are being conflated in the political debate, which is how most environmental policy debates work: the implementation objection becomes an objective objection, and the objective is abandoned rather than the implementation fixed.

What Fair Implementation Looks Like

A more equitable ULEZ would have included: a more generous scrappage scheme for low-income households (the existing scheme helped some people and was insufficient for others); phased introduction in areas with weakest public transport alternatives; investment in transport capacity that preceded rather than accompanied the charge in affected boroughs; and genuine engagement with the communities most affected before the expansion rather than consultation that functioned as notification. None of these implementation improvements were sufficient. The expansion proceeded at the pace and scale that it did. The political backlash in the outer London byelections that followed was predictable and predicted and proceeded anyway.

The Mayor’s office would argue that the health costs of delay fall on Londoners who breathe the air regardless of postcode, and that the urgency of the air quality crisis does not permit the pace of implementation that perfect equity would require. This is also true. Both things are true simultaneously, which is the characteristic of genuine policy dilemmas and which makes ULEZ politically difficult in ways that purely technical analysis does not capture.

My Astra will eventually go. Probably to a buyer outside London who finds my ULEZ misery someone else’s compliance benefit. Until then, I note the charge, I note the data showing air quality improvement in the zones where ULEZ applies, and I note that the policy is working for the objective it set out to achieve while being implemented in a way that generated unnecessary distributional harm. Both are true. The correct response is better implementation of the right policy, not abandonment of the right policy because the implementation was imperfect. More of my transport and politics writing at The London Prat.

The Astra’s Future

It has 84,000 miles. The passenger window doesn’t open properly since last October, which I’ve been attributing to a fault rather than to the Astra’s age, which is: the same age as my youngest sister, who opens perfectly well. The MOT is in July. The ULEZ charge is daily. I will probably have resolved the situation by the time you read this by making a decision I’ve been postponing because postponement is free and resolution is not. This is, metaphorically, also how I feel about North London’s housing situation. I’m working on both.

For more inconvenient environmental policy analysis, see NewsThump.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/