The expansion of the ULEZ scheme to the whole of London will cost £200 million according to a report in the Evening Standard. Based on FOI Act requests, they report that this is required mainly to pay for the extra cameras and does not include the cost of a scrappage scheme which has been promised. Neither does it include the cost imposed on London residents who would need to change their vehicles.
As many as 40,000 vehicles would need to be changed so that’s potentially many more millions of pounds imposed on a proportion of the population with very little benefit.
Nick Rogers, a Tory member of the London Assembly, is quoted as saying “£200m could buy 500 electric buses or fund hundreds of low-traffic “school streets”.
This is yet another example of the reckless expenditure by Mayor Sadiq Khan and TfL. When you are running out of money (as TfL is), you need to stop spending it. TfL might get more income in the short term from non-compliant vehicles paying the charge or from fines on those who don’t pay, but that would likely soon disappear as people changed their vehicles.
Another recent example of gross waste was the disclosure that almost 600 TfL staff earn more than £100,000. The financial management of TfL is clearly out of control. TfL pays such high salaries that it sucks in traffic engineers and management from London boroughs and outside London thus denuding them of valuable expertise.
TfL needs to be removed from the control of the Mayor, and a public transport authority (which is what TfL is) should not have control of the roads used by private vehicles. As we have said before, major reform of the governance and control of TfL is required.
Evening Standard article: https://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/ulez-expansion-greater-london-boundary-cost-two-hundred-million-pounds-b1011721.html
The public consultation on expansion of the ULEZ is still open so please respond to it here if you have not already done so: https://haveyoursay.tfl.gov.uk/cleanair?cid=clean-air
Roger Lawson
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Drivers_London
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Really can’t add anything to this article. I agree 100%. Apart from the facts and figures it’s what I’ve been saying to anyone who will listen.
Malcolm Grace.
The Mayor’s views via TFL is an act of ‘public theft’ by degrading perfectly functional vehicles to a ‘sacred cow’ of an expanding ULEZ. No one is offering any means of compensation for ‘this theft’ that people of ‘his ilk’ like to impose – very similar to what Gordon Brown did with ‘pension theft’! How do these people get so much unilateral power?