09:30 Diane Abbott (Labour)

With London’s population growing year on year, our city is at a crossroads on the issue of the environment in general and air pollution in particular. Londoners must choose whether they want a change for the better. A London with cleaner air and an increased reliance on renewable energy, and that is a safe city for cyclists and pedestrians, is an achievable reality with the right political will; I contend that the current Mayor has not shown that political will. An incoming Mayor must take urgent action.

The Mayor should consider the use of sustainable technologies. I visited a very interesting project in Hackney a week or so ago, where solar panels have been put on top of a big council block. That enables people there to get their electricity more cheaply, and it is also a sustainable energy source. It is a very interesting project, which could be potentially rolled out across London.

Current efforts are insufficient. Not enough progress has been made on increasing the number of hybrid buses in TfL’s fleet; rectifying that deficiency should be a priority. The fact that Oxford Street remains one of the most polluted streets in the world is evidence that measures to reduce pollution from taxis and buses are not being pursued with sufficient energy. We need to establish more accessible grants for environmentally friendly infrastructure development. London can become a global leader in the proliferation of renewable energy sources, such as solar power. London would do well to adopt such good practices as the creation of last-mile delivery hubs, to ensure that the carbon footprint of final-stage delivery is minimised. There are firms in the City that encourage their employees to walk more—if not to work, then at least between offices. We need to improve London’s sustainable infrastructure; that would create jobs in construction and logistics.

Toxic air in London is killing Londoners, and we urgently need measures to tackle it. Promises to meet EU guidelines by 2025 or even by 2030 are unacceptable, and it is shocking that it has taken direct action from the Supreme Court to force the Government and the Mayor to address this issue seriously. It is clear that we have a real opportunity to tackle air pollution through a wholesale shift in the way that we view our living environment. For London, Londoners and the wider population in the UK, it is imperative that we seize the initiative and put an end to this silent killer once and for all, and I am using this opportunity to urge all stakeholders to step up and take responsibility. Individual companies can encourage sustainable travel on the part of their employees; housing developers can encourage sustainable development that uses renewable energy; borough councils can do more to encourage cycling to school, and they can also give out information about air pollution; the Mayor of London, who I think we can agree has comprehensively failed on this issue, can do more; and so can the Government. People should not have had to go to court to force the Government to recognise their responsibilities under EU law.

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10:01 Mark Field (Cities of London and Westminster) (Con)

In a bid to tackle climate change, successive Governments have, through taxation, incentivised drivers to switch to diesel on the basis that it produces less carbon dioxide than petrol. I am sorry to say that this has helped compound the problem. The lobby group, Clean Air in London, led by my indefatigable constituent and good personal friend, Simon Birkett, continues to campaign for a new Clean Air Act to deal with diesel engines, which emit some 20 times more polluting particulates than their petrol equivalents. Clean Air London is rightly calling for a scrappage scheme to remove diesel vehicles from our roads and for widening the congestion charge beyond London, with charges set purely on the basis of emission levels. Drivers may need to be charged far more to drive diesel vehicles through the most polluted areas during rush hour and the ultra-low emission zone should be expanded to include the heavily congested north and south corridors.

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10:11 Zac Goldsmith (Richmond Park) (Con)

London is growing by the equivalent of two extra tube trains a week—the equivalent of one bus every two hours—so it is hard to exaggerate the case for expanding our rail and tube network. We also need a revolution in electric car ownership. It is extraordinary that, despite falling costs, the fact that getting around in electric cars is dramatically cheaper than conventional alternatives and the installation of 1,400 new charging points in the past three years—a consequence of the Mayor’s intervention—that revolution simply has not happened. It will inevitably happen; the market dictates that it will, but the market needs a boost. The economics are already such that there is no reason why new minicabs should not all be electric or zero-emissions, or why companies with big fleets, such as delivery companies, are not automatically replacing their old vehicles with electric alternatives. The maths already stacks up, but somewhere along the line we need a powerful nudge.

London has the largest electric hybrid bus fleet in Europe, but the vast majority of London buses are still diesel. Many cities, including New York and Rome, have introduced whole fleets of electric buses. We have to ask how long will it be before all our buses in London are electric—or at least zero-emissions in other forms. I only learned this recently, but construction equipment, such as diggers, accounts for a staggering 14% of particulate emissions in London. Surely contracts should be awarded only to construction companies that have retrofitted the engines or have vehicles that are new and clean.

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10:30 Barry Gardiner (Labour)

Low-emission zones have already dramatically reduced air pollution here, but the truth is that London’s proposed ultra-low emission zone will not come into effect until 2020, and even then it will apply only in the central congestion charging zone and cover only 7% of the main roads in London that suffer from the worst nitrogen dioxide pollution. It will also exempt buses from meeting the highest Euro 6 standard and require only that all new taxis are zero-emission-capable by 2030. The other 93% of the most polluted roads in London will be outside the zone and may in fact experience greater pollution as more vehicles circumvent the zone and come into more residential and poorer parts of the city. If ever there was a perfect example for the phrase “Too little, too late”, that is surely it.

Enough, already. With cities across Europe adopting low and ultra-low emissions zones, there is a huge prize for manufacturers of low and zero-emission vehicles and there are significant risks for manufacturers that choose to bet against that trend. A responsible Government would reduce risk by adopting the highest standards here today. Will the Minister tell us what progress has been made to establish long-term goals and timescales for a step-by-step rebalancing of fuel duty and vehicle excise duty, consistent with reducing not just CO 2 emissions, but NO 2 and particulate matter impacts? Emissions-based pricing must be the way forward. To achieve that, I ask the Minister to initiate a strategic assessment of the relative benefits of the different options to encourage the manufacture and purchase of low and ultra-low emissions vehicles.

On one point the Mayor’s document is certainly correct: the Government and the EU need to take complementary action and work with local authorities such as TfL to create a national framework of low emission zones, accelerate the uptake of zero-emissions vehicles and ensure that the Euro 6 standard does not reproduce the mistakes of Euro 4 and Euro 5, where the actual performance under road conditions is vastly inferior to that under test conditions.

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