Dear Mayor, don't reverse the good you have done for the air Londoners breathe

Ending the cleaner vehicle discount is a step backwards for everyone in the capital

- BY JONATHAN PRYNN

Next year it will be a decade since Sadiq Khan was first elected Mayor of London.

He has not got everything right — name a political leader who has — but in one area he can justifiably look back with pride and take credit for a real improvement in the quality of life in this great city. London's once notoriously filthy air is cleaner and healthier to breathe now than it was when he came into office. Almost every monitoring site in the capital shows fewer pollutants and air quality here is improving at a faster rate than the rest of the country.

Clean air for Londoners is a cause that the Standard has championed enthusiastically for many years, as far back as the Great Smog of 1952. More recently we have run campaigns under The Air We Breathe and Plug It In banners. So it is all the more puzzling to us that the Mayor would consider putting this remarkable progress in jeopardy. Yet that is precisely what he is doing.

On Christmas Day this year the congestion charge exemption — known as the Cleaner Vehicle Discount (CVD) — that drivers of fully electric and hydrogen cell vehicles have enjoyed since 2019 comes to an end. After that, drivers of EV cars and vans will have to pay the same daily £15 fee as everyone else to enter central London. A laudable and effective incentive that has encouraged countless thousands of motorists to convert to electric will have gone.

Driving people away from EVs

Of course it is true that most private drivers do not have to travel into central London by car — in this city we are lucky to have excellent public transport alternatives.