We can all breathe easier knowing ULEZ is a triumph - but Sadiq Khan must go further on clean air for London

On Friday, a comprehensive study was published looking at the impact of the first full year of the expanded ultra-low emission zone (ULEZ) and the results are crystal clear: the air being breathed by millions of people in London is much cleaner, and that’ll have huge impacts on health outcomes across the capital.

Across Greater London, NO2 has fallen by 27%, and 80% of people in the most deprived communities are no longer living with illegal levels of air pollution. These are huge results.

As a dad of three children, thinking about what the littlest lungs in our house are being exposed to every day has often kept me up at night. It feels like every day more and more evidence piles up showing how pollution from cars and vans means that young lungs can be stunted for life, babies can be born underweight, and lifelong conditions like asthma and allergies can be triggered from the earliest years.

When we moved from the inner city borough of Hackney to the outer borough of Richmond back when we only had our first born, it felt like we were moving from the concrete jungle to the leafy countryside, But the reality is that nowhere in London even comes close to meeting the WHO standards for clean air.

The good news today is that outer boroughs like mine have felt the biggest benefits from ULEZ expansion, with NOx emissions having plummeted by 37% in Richmond compared to a London without this clean air zone. It’s hard to overstate what an impact this will have.

But while this was a huge win for clean air, it’s not the only threat to my children’s future. Next I want to see the mayor get serious on tackling traffic to slash the carbon emissions which are fuelling the flames of the climate emergency. The mayor’s net zero pathway says that we need to cut car miles by 27% by 2030 to hit our climate targets - but we’re a long way away from that right now.

Another thing I noticed when I moved to outer London was that far more people have cars than where we lived in inner London. And not only that, they’re so much bigger.

SUV sales are going through the roof among many of the richest drivers, and that means that emissions are going sky high too. In just one year, 2022 to 2023, SUV sales jumped by 23%, and shockingly, the majority of new cars on our roads are now SUVs. The trend towards bigger vehicles will blow our carbon budgets out of the water, and they make our roads more dangerous for everyone walking and cycling too - especially for kids like mine.

Not only that, but today’s report also shows that while ULEZ has been great for getting cars to become compliant, traffic is still speeding back up to pre-pandemic levels, and the more miles being driven - especially in petrol and diesel cars - the faster we’re racing towards a catastrophically warmer planet.

The reality is, the people driving the most miles in the biggest cars need to drive a bit less, and we need to start designing our cities so it's easier to get where you want to go using low-carbon, affordable public transport and active travel. Nationally, we need the government to follow London and Scotland and introduce a target for cutting traffic by around 20% - improving our health, boosting the economy, and protecting our planet. We need national leadership so that cleaning up our transport networks doesn’t become a political football at a local level.

ULEZ has undoubtedly been a massive success, and politicians of all parties should be learning the lessons from London and introducing clean air zones in cities across the country as an effective public health measure.

But we should also be going further and faster to tackle traffic and slash emissions. That could start with phasing out diesel by 2030, applying a proper levy to the dirtiest drivers in SUVs like they’ve done in Paris, and work towards a smart, fair road charging scheme.

We still have a long road ahead, but ULEZ means I can breathe a bit easier for the time being.

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Russell Warfield is a father of three who works for climate charity Possible.

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