Was Sadiq Khan's ULEZ expansion really more about making money than ensuring cleaner air?
New figures show the London Mayor has pulled in hundreds of millions of pounds extra from fines and fees
LONDON traffic has been a talking point all my life.
My favourite rock band, The Jam, wrote one of their worst-ever songs about it, which featured on their “difficult” second album.
“Leave the city free from traffic/give the place a chance to survive/dirt and filth cover London/give it a chance to breathe again,” sang the bass-player Bruce Foxton. This was back in 1977, so Mr Foxton should be congratulated for his perspicacity if not for the standard of his lyrics.
When Sadiq Khan brought in his huge expansion of the Ultra Low Emissions Zone (ULEZ) last year he sought to justify it using equally emotive language, claiming: “Children with asthma are gasping for air in hospitals across our city.”
In reality, the capital’s air quality had already been on a long-term improving path for several decades before the highly controversial policy was imposed last year. Compared to the intensity of the fumes Foxton was complaining about in the 1970s, London’s air was already markedly fresher.
( https://www.lse.ac.uk/granthaminstitute/news/the-truth-about-londons-ultra-low-emission-zone/ )
But such facts were not much use to Mayor Khan, so he didn’t emphasise them and instead conjured up disturbing imagery of choking children.
Now new figures suggest that grasping rather than gasping may be at the heart of the issue. Because they reveal that the Mayor levied penalty charge notices on motorists to the value of an eye-watering £322.8m in the ten months between the extension being introduced and the end of June.
Even if we assume as many as three-quarters of drivers reduced their own penalty payments from £180 to £90 by coughing-up – as it were - within 14 days, this implies the Mayor will have made more money from penalty notices than from daily regular ULEZ revenues (about £200m in fines to £176m in fees according to my maths).
What a bonanza for a politician who seems to love giving out dollops of cash to the various identity groups that sustain the “rainbow alliance” that got him over the line to re-election in May.
Research published by Khan’s City Hall regime in July purported to show that pollution via Nitrogen oxides was 13 per cent lower than it would have been had the ULEZ expansion not occurred. Yet Bromley Council has done its own research suggesting there has been no pollution reduction.
Even if we accept the City Hall estimate, we can now see that the percentage uplift in revenues has been far more spectacular.
Drivers with older diesel vehicles have been turned into the ultimate cash cows for Khan: £12.50 a day for authorised driving in London, £180 penalty charges rising to £270 for those not paying or making a representation within 28 days. And all this on top of a separate £15 a day charge for driving into the Congestion Charge Zone covering central London.
As motoring organisations have noted, the eagerness with which the Mayor’s Transport for London (TfL) operation has gone after cash from erring drivers raises suspicions that generating income for the Mayor was a key motivation for the ULEZ expansion.
Jack Cousens, head of roads policy at the AA, said: “The ruthlessness of enforcement when a first-time warning letter might achieve the desired effect for most motorists, especially those living outside the zone, remains an issue. ULEZ signage has been accused of not giving enough direction to drivers unfamiliar with those roads.”
TfL insists that revenue generated from the scheme is being reinvested in public transport and that net revenues are set to decline as drivers either upgrade to compliant vehicles or find other ways of travelling around the city.
Yet the Mayor has failed to take a significant proportion of motorists with him on his cleaner air crusade, as evidenced by the continuing incidents of ULEZ cameras being vandalised.
TfL keeps the cost of such law-breaking secret because it argues that disclosing it might incentivise further attacks on its camera network. Yet it was reported in May that more than half of ULEZ cameras in the boroughs of Kingston and Bromley were out of action due to vandalism. Between March 2023 and May 2024 there were more than 4,500 attacks on cameras across the capital.
The sort of traceable motorists who pay their road tax and make sure their vehicles have a valid MoT and insurance can be assumed to be generally law-abiding types (unlike the cowboys who drive around in fake number plates and will never get a ULEZ fine).
To have turned a proportion of them into desperado drivers who feel entitled to disable public property would set alarm bells ringing for any politician with a sense of proportion.
But not so for Khan, who may well be preparing to up the ante even further. “There is clearly still more to do to tackle air pollution, and I’m determined to continue leading from the front in London,” he said in an official letter in March.
What he has up his sleeve next is anybody’s guess, but nobody should be surprised were it to involve yet more millions rolling into his coffers to be dispensed to favoured groups. When it comes to divisive left-wing politicians it seems to me that London’s Mayor is leaving “Two-Tier Keir” Starmer in his slipstream.
You are the carbon they want to reduce. It's not about drivers, it's not about money, that being a convenient side effect, it's about your liberty, they want you atomised, in the pod, eating the bugs, playing the video games. They don't want you to get married, they don't want you to raise kids, they don't want you to have a foreign holiday, or indeed any holidays at all. They just want you to live, consume and die. You are to these globalhomos of Davos little more than cattle, something kept in a pen and killed when the time is right.
I visited London last week. First time in years. I was there for three days and between parking and congestion charges I poppied up 150 quid. The roads are quieter in central London than they were, but the usual bureaucratic tampering with traffic controls, cycle lanes, speed limits, road closures, etc, still meant it took longer to get out of London than it did to drive the rest of the way to Leeds.
Whilst there, if it was too far to walk I took the underground. Presumably that’s part of the plan. I can’t think of any other adjective than nightmarish. Hot, crowded aggressive and intimidating. I’m pretty sure the air down there is far more dangerous than it ever has been on the surface.
I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but Sadiq Khans policies seem to be designed to wilfully destroy the capital both physically and spiritually. Some kind of fifth columnist softening us up for some long term plan.