Louise made an excellent speech on ULEZ at the Council meeting on 24 April. Richard had prepared a speech but was not called to speak, as so many members of the public and Councillors wanted to speak. So here is what he would have said.

“My own objections to ULEZ are because it does something that is rare in British public administration – it
creates massive winners and losers on a random basis, for some of the losers it is devastating, and these are ordinary families not corporations or organisations.
To illustrate, I have a resident who purely by chance has a car that is not ULEZ compliant, who has to travel each day to a workplace not easily accessible by public transport, and for whom the consequence of paying £12.50 a day to go to work is not supportable from his income. Selling his car is difficult as the bottom has fallen out of the market for non-compliant cars. It is difficult now to obtain a second
hand complaint car, and the cost is prohibitive even if you can find one. The supply of new cars has been disrupted by the problems related to computer chips – I have a resident who has been on a waiting list for a year, waiting to buy a new van for his business. Re-distributing non- compliant cars does nothing to improve air quality and the replacement of old cars by new is proceeding at a pace determined by supply, so quite unaffected by ULEZ. ULEZ may lead to some trips in cars being undertaken by public
transport, though not so much in Sutton where the public transport infrastructure is less well developed.
So ULEZ will, randomly, reduce some families to poverty with at best a small effect on air quality.
Clearly a major factor is the deal Sadiq Khan made with the Government to offset part of the implications of the post-pandemic collapse in TfL finances through ULEZ, in return for Government subsidy to cover the rest. So let us be clear that the Tory Government is as much implicated
in this as the Mayor of London. In this chamber, the only political party leading the fight and not implicated in causing the problem is the Liberal Democrats.”