heresa May recognises that air pollution is one of the biggest threats faced by millions of citizens: last November, after a judge ordered the government to produce a plan to tackle an avoidable cause of up to 40,000 premature deaths, she told MPs: “Nobody in this house doubts the importance of the issue of air quality. We have taken action, there is more to do and we will do it.” Roll forward six months to last Friday, and, after a further court appearance and another ruling, a plan was finally produced. It came out almost without warning on the day when most media organisations were preoccupied with the aftermath of the local elections. In the previous week, some ideas had been trailed all of which seem to have been too radical for inclusion in the plan, at least for a government on an election footing.
What emerged was a vacuous, flimsy ragbag of half-formed proposals that try to pass the buck to local government while denying it the powers councils need to act. ClientEarth, the group of environmental lawyers that brought the case, says the plan is barely worth the paper it is written on. They think it is actually weaker than the plan that was ruled inadequate in November. The mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, called it “woeful”.
The prime minister has form on making impressive promises and then failing to live up to them. Think of ideas like putting workers on company boards, first proposed last July and abandoned by October, or her pledge to stand up for working families, another July commitment that was history by November, the last chance to stop cuts in tax credits that will leave some working families £2,500 worse off.
Tackling air pollution is not only a legal commitment that the government is now nearly seven years past the last date for fulfilling; protecting citizens from a preventable cause of illness and early death must be the most basic of moral obligations. But it is also hard. Most of the winners – the thousands of children whose lungs won’t be scarred for life by breathing polluted air, and the thousands more who would escape its debilitating consequences – won’t notice. The losers, on the other hand, will feel immediate pain. Motorists who bought diesel cars in response to earlier government incentives will reasonably be enraged. So will one of Europe’s most powerful lobbies, the motor manufacturers who directly and indirectly account for nearly a million jobs.
Cutting pollution was accepted as a priority by the last Labour government back in 2008. The government does not dispute its obligation, it merely avoids it, again and again, because it fears the backlash that will come from trying to stop people driving their diesel cars in heavily polluted areas. There are two ways of doing it: most effectively, limit access to designated clear air zones, probably by a charge; or compensate drivers with high emission vehicles, through some kind of scrappage scheme. Neither of these options is put forward in a viable or detailed manner in the consultation paper that the department for the environment published before the weekend. ClientEarth, which has been holding the government’s feet to the fire for more than five years on this, hesitates to challenge again during an election campaign, but the period for consultation closes on 15 June, just a week after polling day. It should put its doubts aside.
Meanwhile Mrs May would do well to remember two pieces of history, one ancient and one very recent. Back in the 1960s, another woman, Barbara Castle, dared tackle the motoring lobby, forcing on them the breathalyser and seat belts. In the past five years, the minister who did most to block attempts to fulfil Britain’s legal obligations was George Osborne, the first person Mrs May sacked as prime minister. A conspicuous break with the man she thinks embodies the apparently heedless implementation of austerity, who now edits the only daily newspaper of Britain’s most polluted city, London, really would be a symbol of change.
source:the guardian
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