LEZ scheme is an expensive dud - ​Iain Whyte

Inverleith Councillor Iain Whyte

Last week City of Edinburgh Council erected the signs for its Low Emission Zone in the city centre. Due to be enforced from June 2024 the scheme will fine owners of older vehicles. Fines start at £60 but escalate to an eyewatering £480 for a fourth “offence” within 90 days.

These fines will only hit poorer drivers of older vehicles they can’t afford to replace. Many will be small traders using vans and providing vital services in the city. Services that will become harder to source or more expensive for everyone.

We all want clean air, and the council insists there are “still areas where certain pollutants … are higher than the legal standard”. But this is a lie. The council’s own 2022 pollution monitoring shows the whole city already meets this standard.

Vehicle compliance with the LEZ standard also increased from 48 to 78 per cent in the last six years – and will keep getting better quickly as more older vehicles are scrapped. Most of the pollution in central Edinburgh is caused by buses that already meet the LEZ standard, so this won’t change. And the council admits that air pollution will increase in residential streets around the zone as non-compliant vehicles bypass it.

Road signs being installed for Edinburgh’s Low Emission Zone

Edinburgh’s air is already the cleanest it has ever been. PM2.5 particulate figures show us as one of the best in the world, about half the levels of a relatively clean London, and very close to an extremely stringent World Health Organisation guideline that almost no major world cities meet.

Left of centre politicians pushing LEZs complain of “conspiracy theories” when some who oppose them suggest the cameras must be for a different purpose like future controls on public movement or road user charging. I’m not one for conspiracies but they are no surprise when the evidence shows the LEZ being enforced on us is a costly dud that will make no practical difference to air quality.

The negligible improvements in air quality predicted in a very modest zone until the few remaining older vehicles are scrapped doesn’t seem to be worth the £400,000 a year it will cost to enforce.