Mayor of London Sadiq Khan has committed to expanding the Ultra-Low Emission Zone from October 2021, after being re-elected earlier this month.
City Hall says the new zone will be 18 times the size of the current central London area. From 25 October, it will cover all streets inside the North and South circular roads in the capital city.
Owners of non-complaint vehicles will be required to pay £12.50 a day to enter the area. The mayor’s office said around 100,000 cars and 35,000 vans could be affected by the tighter standards every day.
Petrol cars must comply with Euro 4 standards – usually vehicles registered from January 2006 – and diesel owners will need to pay up unless their car meets the Euro 6 standard, meaning they were registered after September 2015.
The mayor said the central London ULEZ has been “transformational since its introduction in April 2019” and claimed it helped to reduce roadside concentrations of nitrogen dioxide gas by nearly 50 percent.
He added that the initial ULEZ cut the number of state schools suffering illegal levels of pollution by 97 percent – from 455 schools in 2016 to 14 in 2019, prior to the Covid-19 pandemic
“I pledge to be the greenest Mayor London has ever had, with a mandate from Londoners to put the environment and climate policies at the heart of my second term in office. Today I am reaffirming my commitment to speed up the cleaning of London’s toxic air,” said Khan.
“In central London, the Ultra-Low Emission Zone has already helped cut toxic roadside nitrogen dioxide pollution by nearly half and led to reductions that are five times greater than the national average. But pollution isn’t just a central London problem, which is why expanding the ULEZ later this year will benefit Londoners across the whole of the city and is a crucial step in London’s green recovery.
“There is no time to waste. We know pollution hits the poorest Londoners the hardest, which is why I’m doing everything I can to improve the health for all Londoners.”
ALSO READ:
London ULEZ: what you need to know