There’s a Reason Ulez is So Hated

As Kevin Rees jailed for 15 years for blowing up a Ulez camera with a homemade bomb, we see why London’s anti-motorist money-making ‘clean air’ scheme is so widely hated.

From Tilak’s Substack

Tilak Doshi

Last Friday, a retired appliance engineer named Kevin Rees was jailed for 15 years at the Old Bailey for blowing up a Ulez camera in a London street in December 2023. The judge found that the offence was motivated by terrorism; the blast damaged cars and property up to 100 metres away, including a child’s bedroom. Of course, building a bomb and detonating it on a residential street is a grave crime, and nothing below excuses it.

But it is fair to ask how a roadside charging scheme became a cause that drove one man to explosives, and why as many as 1,500 cameras are said to have been attacked in some way. Despite an FOI request for an update on how many cameras and other sensors had been attacked or removed, the authorities withheld year-by-year vandalism counts and repair costs, citing public safety and criminal investigations in February 2026.

The extension of the zone to all 32 boroughs in 2023 was imposed on millions of people who had no meaningful say in it. Labour’s loss of the Uxbridge by-election that July was widely blamed on it, and London Mayor Sir Sadiq Khan himself has acknowledged that when the original zone was launched, “all the mainstream political parties, including my own, were opposed”. What we are looking at is less a public-health measure than a moral crusade with a revenue stream.

Moving goalposts and modelled deaths

The standard defence is that Ulez and related measures (such as Low Traffic Neighbourhoods) have worked; London’s air has indeed improved. In 2024, for the first time, London recorded no breach of the UK’s legal annual limit for nitrogen dioxide, and compliance with Ulez standards has risen from 39% to 97%. One might think this the moment to declare victory. Instead the goalposts have moved. In 2021 the World Health Organisation cut its annual guideline for nitrogen dioxide from 40 to 10 micrograms per cubic metre, and for fine particulates from 10 to five, and Imperial College’s Frank Kelly has welcomed Khan’s commitment to bring London into line. But a target that recedes as one approaches it is not a target but a treadmill.

Driving the treadmill is the linear no-threshold assumption that harm falls in proportion to exposure all the way down to zero. Thus, only when exposure is zero can we know that harms are fully avoided. Hence the Labour Assembly Member declaration that “no level of air pollution is safe”. It is a doctrine no policy can ever satisfy, since any residual exposure is by definition a residual harm; cost-benefit analysis is replaced by a liturgy of pristineness. Paracelsus knew better: the dose makes the poison. So, London’s own fine-particle levels, halved since the early 2000s, still remain a problem by this standard.

The human toll is then expressed in deaths. Public Health England put the figure at around 4,000 premature deaths a year in London, and City Hall’s latest Imperial study claims attributable deaths fell by roughly 40% between 2019 and 2024. These are not bodies counted in a morgue with coroners’ reports but outputs of a model. These models multiply estimated exposure by a “concentration-response coefficient” and, under the no-threshold assumption, finds victims wherever there is a pollutant. Nor is it obvious how much credit the zone deserves. Defra’s count of UK zones breaching the nitrogen dioxide limit fell from 33 in 2019 to five in 2024, in a country where by one count only 10 zones charge motorists at all. Vehicle fleets turn over everywhere, and internal combustion cars keep improving their pollutants emission performances. The honest question is how much of London’s improvement Ulez can claim, and at what price.

In August, the Mayor produced his trump card: a Lancet Public Health study reporting that London schoolchildren’s lung growth caught up with that of children in Luton after the zone arrived, published alongside an op-ed by Khan himself in the Guardian. This deserves scrutiny before cheers. It rests on a single comparison town; its follow-up, from 2018 to 2022, spans the pandemic years when traffic collapsed everywhere; and it does not measure the London-wide expansion that provoked the Ulez revolt. The same Queen Mary-led team’s earlier study, in 2019, found no improvement in children’s respiratory health from London’s original low emission zone.

Nor is the research ecosystem a disinterested one. Emails obtained by Conservatives under freedom of information show that in November 2021 the Mayor’s deputy for the environment, Shirley Rodrigues, wrote to Imperial’s Professor Kelly calling a study by his Imperial colleagues – which found only small improvements at launch – “misleading”, and asked him to set the record straight. Kelly’s Environmental Research Group has been paid more than £800,000 by Khan’s office since 2021, and he agreed to issue a statement, partly written by Rodrigues, saying Ulez had “dramatically reduce[d] air pollution”. City Hall called this “standard practice”. It probably is, and that is precisely the problem: the umpire is paid by one side.

Bootleggers, Baptists and the mayor’s purse

In 1983 the economist Bruce Yandle offered a parable that explains more about modern regulation than most textbooks. Sunday alcohol bans, he observed, were backed by two unlikely allies: Baptists, who thought drink sinful, and bootleggers, who profited when the legal trade was shut. The Baptists supply the moral cover; the bootleggers supply the booze, get the profits and make the necessary payoffs to interested parties to keep the status quo. Khan’s Ulez is a textbook case. The Baptists are the clean-air campaigners and the professional classes of inner London, sincere in their conviction that tailpipes are poisoning their children. The bootlegger is Sadiq Khan and City Hall.

The sums involved are not insubstantial. In 2025 the zone raised £57 million in fines and £123 million in fees, against a running cost TfL puts at £100 million. Over the full 2024-25 year, TfL’s own figures put gross Ulez income at £219 million and Congestion Charge income at £271 million; add in the Low Emission Zone and the combined road-charging income in the statutory accounts was about £940 million, against passenger income (bus and rail fares) of about £5.3 billion (TfL freedom-of-information reply; 2024-25 quarterly report). By law the net proceeds must be reinvested in London’s transport network, which is true but beside the point. Money is fungible, and a transport budget fattened by motorists’ penalties is one City Hall need not source from elsewhere. Set against the budget of the whole Greater London Authority of roughly £15.5 billion, the gross take is about 6%.

With compliance at 97% (remember those cameras and sensors everywhere?), the rational response of a revenue-hungry administration is to widen the net, and on cue Khan has said he will remove the congestion charge exemption for electric vehicles, the very cars motorists were urged to buy to escape the zone. My colleague Richard Eldred examined the leaked TfL documents on this war on motorists in the Daily Sceptic last year and I covered the class war on motorist in these pages previously.

The Mayor’s office yearly revenue is about £900 million, with a capital programme dominated by housing and policing. Spending on woke causes such as equality, diversity and inclusion, gay parades, carnivals, Pride grants and the Shared Endeavour Fund (against hate, intolerance, radicalisation and extremism – read Islamophobia) are of course small in the scheme of things. The scandal is not that a LGBTQ rainbow pedestrian crossing in Trafalgar Square is paid by Ulez fines. It is that a scheme of punitive fines, taxes and charges on white van tradesmen and the working class family with an older car is sold in the name of public health.

City Hall is not an austere place. The Mayor himself drew £160,976 in 2024, when he and at least 13 of his staff were reported to be out-earning the Prime Minister, while his deputy mayors’ salaries had risen to roughly £148,000. A mayor’s remit of buses, policing and housing should occupy anyone fulltime. Yet Khan has found the time to chair (and jet around the world for) C40 Cities, the global climate network. Khan, is no mere city mayor. He is a key Labour party figure reported to have backed a pledge to rejoin the EU, a cause Prime Minister Burnham has just put on the table. A 2019 C40 report set out an “ambitious target” of no meat and dairy by 2030. The direction is plain. Brussels and the climate summits are fine hobbies, but the people paying for them are the van drivers and working families in the poorer, outer boroughs of London.

The irony is rich. As mayor of Greater Manchester, Burnham scrapped his city-region’s charging clean air zone, arguing that even a small one would be “a considerable financial burden” for businesses in a cost-of-living crisis, and promising to hit legal limits by investments instead. Londoners, under a far larger zone, were offered no such clemency. And the burden falls hardest where capacity to absorb it is least. A haulier whose lorry fails the standard has faced £100 to £200 a day in London’s low emission zone since 2008, and a £50 daily charge for non-compliant lorries in Birmingham. The tax’s incidence ends up in freight rates and, in due course, on the supermarket shelf.

Rousseau in the boroughs

When my wife and I moved to Britain from Singapore to be nearer our daughter’s family, a close friend invited me to Edinburgh. He could not drive up to the train station: his old car fell foul of the city’s low emission zone, so he had to arrange a meeting point outside its boundary. I was baffled. Singapore, where life expectancy reached 83.9 years in 2025, among the longest in the world, rations cars too, through certificates of entitlement and road pricing, but chiefly to keep traffic moving on a small island.

Why do so many otherwise sensible people embrace purity as policy? Rousseau – whom Voltaire famously teased in 1755 for making readers of his Noble Savage discourse long to walk on all fours – bequeathed the notion that modernity is a fall from grace and nature a lost Eden. His angst over Western modernity combined with Malthus’s profoundly wrong prophecy of limits to growth. Karl Popper, in The Open Society and its Enemies, showed us where the pursuit of Plato’s utopia ends: in coercion. Rupert Darwall traces the evolution of green tyranny in our times, in part from the irrationality of the German Romantic movement of the 18th and 19th centuries. Attach that tradition to a child’s health and it becomes unimpeachable, for what could be a stronger lever than the fear that your toddler is inhaling the fumes of dirty cars and buses?

A saner settlement

None of this is an argument against clean air, so long as real trade-offs are weighed appropriately. In an objective cost-benefit analysis, the preferences of the privileged lanyard classes should play no role. It is an argument against treating air as a sacrament. A sane policy would begin from the fact that London already meets its legal limits, and that further tightening must pass the test applied to any other public spending: what does it cost per life-year saved, and who pays? It would freeze the outer-London expansion until its benefits are assessed by researchers who are not on City Hall’s payroll. It would target genuine hotspots, such as busy roadsides beside schools or even poorly ventilated subway stations, rather than fining a plumber for a van he paid off years ago.

The Baptists will keep preaching and the bootleggers will keep going ker-ching on their cash registers. Londoners, who must drive, deliver and pay, are entitled to ask for the one thing neither will supply, which is proportion and reasonable trade-offs. This certainly needs no explosive devices to get it. We have a ballot box, and the next mayoral election falls in 2028.

This article was first published in the Daily Sceptic https://dailysceptic.org/2026/10/11/theres-a-reason-ulez-is-so-hated/

Dr Tilak K. Doshi is the Daily Sceptic’s Energy Editor. He is an economist, a member of the CO2 Coalition and a former (cancelled) contributor to Forbes. Follow him on Substack and X.

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