SIMPSON SAYS

CLEAN AIR, OR CLEANING UP?

Richard is fuming about the cost of clean air

By Richard Simpson, industry pundit

It should be pretty obvious to everyone that inflation is going up, and one of the drivers of that inflation is an increase in transport costs.

Fuel, drivers’ wages, and even the price of vehicles and tyres are all on the up. And there’s no way that these increases can, or should, be absorbed by hauliers. Unfortunately, this means that transport costs are passed on down the chain until they manifest themselves as increased prices for everything from consumer goods to building projects.

So sensible politicians would, you’d think, be taking all steps that they could to avoid burdening hauliers with unnecessary extra costs. Sadly, there is plenty of evidence that local politicians are anything but sensible. Local enthusiasm for costly Clean Air Zones continues unabated, with Dundee, Edinburgh, Newcastle, Greater Manchester, Bristol and Oxford all set to introduce them, no doubt inspired by cities such as Bath and Birmingham, which already have them in place.

To say that you are against clean air is like saying you are against motherhood and apple pie: no one wants to inhale toxins. But all too often it is trucks and coaches that get hammered by extra tolls, while locals in cars (who actually cause most of the congestion and pollution) get away scotfree. In Bath, even the local politicians who introduced the Clean Air Zone admitted that the real causes of congestion and pollution were families with multiple cars (a Range Rover for daddy, a BMW for mummy, and a knackered old VW Polo for the Croatian nanny to take Tarquin to nursery in), but these people vote, and hey, you know how it is.

Said local politicians are all too keen to make helpful suggestions as to how hauliers can avoid tolls when delivering goods into their towns. Freight can go on rail (yeah, right), or hauliers can invest in new vehicles that meet Euro VI or run on electricity, or get a conversion kit that will miraculously transform a Euro V truck to a Euro VI.

Well, most hauliers would love to invest in new vehicles, if they were available and affordable, but for many they are not. And while emissions upgrade kits do exist for some buses and coaches, the number of different makes and model of trucks in use do not make them practical or economic to develop and certify for the freight sector.

But even the local politicians in Britain’s provincial cities seem to have a better grasp of the realities of life than the Mayor for London, Sadiq Kahn. Now, Mr Kahn is in trouble, because one of his pet projects: Transport for London; is running out of passengers and money.

It’s running out of money because Kahn froze fares, and passenger numbers fell off a cliff when Covid saw many Londoners elect to give up commuting. Some have since decided they have had enough of living in Kahn’s crimeinfested urban dystopia and moved out of the capital, while others have decided that a home office is more efficient and comfortable than spending hours commuting every day with their nose in someone else’s armpit and the prospect of someone else’s knife in their ribs. And who can blame them? So London’s tube trains and red buses are rapidly becoming empty white elephants. And none are more useless and expensive than the New Routemaster, which was of course the pet project of Boris Johnson when he was doing Mr Khan’s job back in the day (these days, he confines himself to making model buses out of the wine boxes left over from parties).

TfL got saddled with the ownership of these monstrosities quite simply because no commercial company would buy them new. And now they are desperate to get rid of them, but they are an even less attractive prospect in the used market. The trouble is, they need refurbishment if they are to struggle on into the second half of their miserable lives and that’s an expensive business given that there are 1000 of the things on the TfL fleet. Cost of the refurbs is estimated at £31 million, which is money TfL just doesn’t have. But nor can it afford to write them off, as the cost of their introduction was £350 million! They were meant to be cheap and clean to run; but their under-engineered hybrid driveline requires the diesel engine to be running almost all the time, so they are actually as ‘dirty’ as a conventional bus. This is a problem for Kahn. He is heavily invested in the TfL bus fleet, personally and politically. So he needs money from somewhere, and to get it he intends to price private motor vehicles off the streets of the capital (while retaining his two ‘work’ Range Rovers: one for him and his dog, the other for his security detail). This will be done by expanding the current ULEZ, and introducing a daily charge on all vehicles from out of town entering the capital. And that’s just phase one. When technology allows, there will be further ‘pay to use’ charging on busy roads. All this on top of the existing congestion charge. It means more revenue for TfL, and more ‘jobs for the boys’ who work there, but it also means a huge increase in cost and administrative overhead for hauliers running into London.

Ultimately, who pays? Well, Londoners will, of course, encouraging more to move out, fewer to move in and reducing TfL’s fare revenue still further, prompting no doubt even more inventive tolling measures. Wasn’t it Margret Thatcher who said: “The problem with socialism is that sooner or later you run out of other people’s money”?

London may well run out of people too.

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