The government must tackle air pollution

Churchill is said to have once quipped “never let a good crisis go to waste.” Policymakers faced with tackling Britain’s noxious air would do well to bear his maxim in mind. Air pollution is an issue currently at the forefront of public concern. Two common pollutants, NOx and PM2.5, cause the equivalent of 40,000 deaths per year. Alerts about London pollution levels regularly appear on the front pages of the newspapers, with the London Evening Standard recently reporting warnings that Londoners “should avoid doing strenuous exercise,” and the Daily Mail reporting that “One third of nursery pupils are exposed to dangerous levels of air pollution.”

ResPublica's new report on pollution looks at how this crisis can be stemmed.

Pollution is not just a London issue. Cities from Southampton to Bristol are in breach of EU air quality limits. The government has proposed “Clean Air Zones” around the centres of the most polluted cities similar to the London Congestion Charge, which will levy a charge on older, more polluting vehicles. However, its last plan only suggested five such zones, while 16 UK cities are currently breaking European Union limits.

Brexit might relieve us of the obligation to comply with these EU standards, but not of the damage caused; studies show the pollution from living near major roads is strongly linked to dementia, and medical experts suggest there is no safe limit for nitrogen oxide emissions from cars.

Air pollution is a matter of such public concern not just because of its direct health costs, but because those costs are borne by everyone, not just the polluters. A recent study led by Prashant Kumar of the University of Surrey found that those worst exposed to air pollution were bus users, with car users benefitting from sealed, air-conditioned vehicles.

Yet still, the crisis persists. Governments of all stripes have been unacceptably sanguine on cleaning up our cities, wary of “war on the motorist” headlines. The main difficulty is a familiar one: who pays to tackle pollution? Transport policy measures can be divided up into three paradigms “Avoid,” “Shift,” and “Improve.” Most pressing is to “improve” car technology, making vehicles more efficient and lowering emissions. But a great many polluting cars, buses, taxis, and delivery vans are going to have to be used for a significantly shorter time period than their natural lifespan, with expensive replacement costs.

There is also a strong distributional, and, dare I say it, class dimension to the “improving” issue. The proposed Clean Air Zones will make it more expensive to use older vehicles—those made before the Euro 6 standards for diesel and Euro 4 for petrol. The Euro standards, which are upgraded every few years, set EU-wide limits on the levels of pollution per vehicle. Older cars are cheaper cars and thus more accessible to poorer households (or the “just about managing”). A fix for air pollution that can fly politically must say something to this group.

One answer, among several in ResPublica’s new paper “Air Necessities: Place-based approaches to a pollution crisis,” is Pollution Reduction Vouchers of £1000, available in Clean Air Zone cities for low-income households who scrap a polluting vehicle or convert it to run on cleaner Liquified Petroleum Gas (LPG). Converting old cars to gas has the benefit of being much cheaper than a new plug-in electric vehicle, and being cheaply available (£1.5k) right now on the market.

They would be funded firstly through the revenue raised from the operation of Clean Air Zones themselves, and secondly through a £10 surcharge on new vehicle registrations, raising £30m. This is just a start—any further additional funding from central government would go towards decreasing the number of polluting vehicles. The benefits of a tightly-focused scheme such as this are that there is much more bang-for-buck in terms of emissions reduced per pound. The impact is also felt directly in the cities where the worst pollution is, rather than dispersed throughout the whole country as a national scrappage scheme would do.

That is only half the story. We also need broad-based policies to “shift” people to less-polluting means of transport or help them to “avoid” travel. In the short term, we propose that our Pollution Reduction Vouchers could alternatively be traded in for a public transport pass, bike, or car club membership, helping to reduce the overall number of cars in urban areas and directly subsidising people to shift to less polluting modes of travel.

But the fact remains that our cities are still very much set up for a driving-based lifestyle. If the crisis is not to be wasted, we need to rethink the purpose of increasingly scarce city-centre land and how it contributes to economic productivity. Just as air pollution exacts a cost on us all, the vast swathes of land occupied by parked cars represents lost potential, land that isn’t being used for a myriad of other revenue-generating, land value-raising purposes, whether housing, offices, public realm, or even vertical farming.

This is where councils come in. With new powers over buses and powerful Metro-mayors, they finally have the scale and political mandate to invest for the long-term, matching the “stick” of Clean Air Zone Charges with the “carrot” of affordable, high-quality and extensive public transport, so that transport costs are not increased, or are even reduced.

But most importantly, councils need to communicate to citizens that they are not introducing arbitrary new taxes, but implementing a coherent plan to transform their cities for the sake of public health and economic productivity.