How Leeds clean air zone will harm city’s economy and environment – Sam Packer

What has emerged is a proposal to altogether ban drivers from driving across Birmingham but the unfortunate truth is that so-called clean air zones fail to achieve their purpose of making the air cleaner in cities.

Yorkshire leaders call on Chancellor Sajid Javid to fund clean air zone plans

At the TaxPayers’ Alliance, we have been on the front line fighting these zones, launching grassroots campaigns against them. Restriction zones unfairly penalise those who rely on cars for their profession. Cities across the UK, including Leeds, regularly seek to attract business and promote enterprise.

Yet, at the same time, they are implementing rules which actively hinder small traders, taxi drivers, plumbers, delivery men and all sorts of other enterprises by adding major costs on to their bills.

Leeds clean air charging zones will not affect private motorists, insist transport chiefs

This, in turn, has a knock-on effect on employment numbers, wages and the cost of everyone’s goods and services. This will be even worse in any city that adopts the Birmingham proposal Not being dependent on a vehicle for work is not a protection, because like all indirect taxes, the costs get passed onto the consumer. Trade organisations and government figures alike have decried the steady decline of the high street, but adding extra costs on to retailers is an obvious way to speed it up.

Leeds Clean Air Zone ‘to be significantly postponed’, council announces

It is also worth considering that inner cities contain the country’s most deprived areas. Pushing up costs for businesses in cities means pushing up the cost of living for the poorest people in the country. The people of West Yorkshire are not yet paying the Leeds charge thanks, Leeds City Council says, to “a government delay in delivering digital systems required to make the zones operational and enforceable”.

While businesses and consumers alike may be grateful, this delay highlights two further issues. Any system that relies on government IT or technology is bound to be riddled with errors and delays. Secondly, the fact government technology is required means that the general taxpayer is contributing to the fund, not merely the producers of pollution.

Some proponents of clean air schemes would accept the economic case against them, but argue that the environmental impact more than makes up for it. Yet a number of British and Dutch studies have shown that the impact of low emission zones have failed to make a substantive difference to air quality. King’s College published a study in 2018 suggesting that there was no evidence to show improvements in the quality of children’s respiration as a result of London’s low emission zone.

This is possibly because clean air zones do not seem to result in more people switching to greener alternatives in the medium to long term. When London’s low emission zone was introduced, there was a significant impact in the first year with a number of lorries, vans and bus companies switching to lower emission alternatives. Yet within five years, the rate was the same as the national average.

The solution to the pollution problems of Britain’s major cities is better infrastructure. Rather than penalising those who have to drive, national and local government ought to be aiming to improve roads and public transport.

Cars burn most fuel when accelerating from still, meaning that traffic jams are actually the largest cause of traffic pollution. Solving the traffic problems that people deal with on a daily basis in Leeds would do far more for air quality than any clean air zone. The RAC suggests the UK economy lost out on £8bn due to traffic jams in 2018.

Examples of infrastructure improvements that would go some way to solving this problem in Leeds are reopening the Skipton to Colne Railway, opening a Munich-style S-Bahn network of trams that can run on train tracks through Leeds and the electrification of the Midland Main Line.

These, along with 25 other proposals laid out by the TaxPayers’ Alliance’s Great British Transport Competition Report last year, could be completed for half the cost of HS2.

Clean air zones are an ineffective and enterprise-sapping attempt to improve pollution problems. The public’s wallets and lungs would be better off if cities like Leeds reconsidered their plans and opted to focus on making transport better.

Sam Packer is media campaign manager at the TaxPayers’ Alliance.