Next year it will be a decade since Sadiq Khan was first elected Mayor of London.
He has not got everything right — name a political leader who has — but in one area he can justifiably look back with pride and take credit for a real improvement in the quality of life in this great city. London’s once notoriously filthy air is cleaner and healthier to breathe now than it was when he came into office.
Almost every monitoring site in the capital shows fewer pollutants and air quality here is improving at a faster rate than the rest of the country.
Clean air for Londoners is a cause that the Standard has championed enthusiastically for many years, as far back as the Great Smog of 1952. More recently we have run campaigns under The Air We Breathe and Plug It In banners.
So it is all the more puzzling to us that the Mayor would consider putting this remarkable progress in jeopardy. Yet that is precisely what he is doing. On Christmas Day this year the congestion charge exemption — known as the Cleaner Vehicle Discount (CVD) — that drivers of fully electric and hydrogen cell vehicles have enjoyed since 2019 comes to an end. After that, drivers of EV cars and vans will have to pay the same daily £15 fee as everyone else to enter central London.
A laudable and effective incentive that has encouraged countless thousands of motorists to convert to electric will have gone. Driving people away from EVs Of course it is true that most private drivers do not have to travel into central London by car — in this city we are lucky to have excellent public transport alternatives. But many people do.
Companies with large delivery fleets, DPD, Amazon, DHL, FedEx, Royal Mail, to name but a few have invested millions of pounds in EV vans, partly because they want to be doing the right thing, but also because it makes good financial sense.
The same is true of supermarkets and other retailers. Unless there is a rethink from the GLA they will soon face yet another burden at a time when they are struggling to cope with a raft of extra costs ranging from energy bills to business rates.
And not least the taxis and private hire operators, such as Uber, that have been rightly encouraged to green their huge fleets will face a punitive new financial burden of up to £5,500 per vehicle per year. Uber’s own internal polling found that almost 90 per cent of non EV-drivers said removing the EV exemption would make them less likely to switch.
More than 40 per cent of Uber’s EV drivers said they were likely to switch back to a petrol or diesel vehicle. The stakes are incredibly high. Around 40 per cent of the miles driven in Greater London on Uber are now in fully electric cars, but the polling suggests that progress will be stopped in its tracks. It is those sort of calculations that prompted 40 companies and organisations ranging from the AA to Zedify to write to the Mayor last year urging him to reconsider.
As the letter says, “Many of us have taken on debt to invest in our children’s future and in van sales are double those in the UK. In the Swedish capital of Stockholm all city-centre parking spaces run by the city must be equipped with charging points. Transport for London’s response is that the congestion charge is all about keeping central London’s roads moving, not about improving air quality. As the number of EVs on London’s road’s increases, so the efficacy of the charge is undermined, it argues.
TfL also maintains that drivers have been given seven years notice of the ending of the CVD, since it was first flagged in its 2018 Transport Strategy. Yet that same strategy laid out plans for a raft of other measures, such as a central London zero emissions zone and what it describes as a “more sophisticated way of paying for road use”. Little of this has come to pass, leaving the CVD to do much of the heavy lifting when it comes to cleaning central London’s air.
It would be a tragedy if the progress achieved over the past decade on Khan’s watch was to be undone by a dogmatic insistence on sticking to an arbitrary timetable. Today the Standard launches a new clean air campaign, Leading the Charge. We urge the Mayor to think again, to lock in that progress in reducing pollution that has done so much to improve everyday life in London and reverse his regressive decision to end the CVD. Londoners deserve no less.
Leading The Charge is supported by commercial partners which share the project’s aims but our journalism remains editorially independent.
