London mayor Boris Johnson is risking children’s health by blocking action to clean up London’s poor air quality, the city’s former deputy mayor has claimed.

Nicky Gavron said the mayor had failed to deliver on his promise of an electric car ‘revolution’ and is not cleaning up buses quickly enough. London has been in breach of EU pollution limits since 2010, and is not expected to reach safe levels for another 15 years, despite the threat of fines from the EU.

“Until we have political leadership that takes this issue seriously we must face the reality that London’s children will continue to be exposed to levels of pollution that will scar their health for the rest of their lives,” Gavron, who was deputy mayor under Ken Livingston, writes in The Guardian.

New research shows the capital’s air is now so dangerous in some places that the idea of what constitutes a safe route to school for children should be reconsidered to avoid the most polluted roads, she said. Vehicles, in particular diesel exhausts, are the main source of tiny particulate pollution linked to serious health problems, as well as thousands of premature deaths in London annually.

Johnson was forced to defend his record on tackling air pollution last year, after a presentation by air quality experts at King’s College said they believed Oxford Street had the highest NO2 levels in the world.

Gavron said that while Johnson is introducing an ‘ultra low emissions zone’ (ULEZ), its 2020 start date is too late and the scheme will exempt some of the most polluting vehicles. The new “Boris buses”, which have been billed as clean, green vehicles, will fail to meet the new zone’s emissions limit and require special permission to enter toll-free, Gavron said.



“There is a real move for radical reform and it is only Boris Johnson’s intransigence which is holding change back,” she said. “Unfortunately, this mayor has fallen asleep at the wheel.”

Matthew Pencharz, the mayor’s environment adviser, rejected the charges. “This predictable attempt to discredit the mayor is way off the mark. The truth is that the mayor is investing hundreds of millions of pounds on the most ambitious package of measures to improve air quality in the world. Thanks to his actions we now meet the legal limits for eight out of the nine EU regulated pollutants and the number of Londoners living in areas above nitrogen dioxide limits has been halved since 2008.”

The mayor’s office defended the new Routemaster buses and their use inside the proposed ULEZ, saying no other diesel-electric bus “comes close” to it in terms of NO2 emissions. Over a thousand of London’s oldest buses had been retrofitted to cut their NO2 emissions, his office said.

The ULEZ will apply to the same area as the current congestion charge zone, with drivers of petrol cars older than those meeting Euro 4 standards and Euro 6 for diesel cars needing to pay £12.50 in addition to the congestion charge. Unlike the congestion charge, the ULEZ would be in effect all week round, according to a public consultation which closes on Friday.

On the week that most children go back to school, Gavron argues that safe routes to the 1,148 schools that are within 150 metres of pollution hotspots should be reconsidered to avoid roads with the worst pollution levels, in particular in east London. The Mayor’s office has previously said that pupils should be kept indoors during playtime at times of high pollution.

The former deputy mayor highlights comments by Jonathan Grigg, professor of paediatric respiratory and environmental medicine at Queen Mary University, who said: “by the time anything happens [action on pollution] their [children’s] lungs will have been damaged and they will not have obtained their maximum growth potential. In 10 years they will have suffered all the effects we now see coming through increased vulnerability to a range of respiratory disorders in childhood and goodness knows what that leads to in terms of vulnerability to disease in later life.”

Gavron urges an urgent strategy to tackle the problem, “including lower speed limits, measures to reduce congestion and idling and an ultra low emission zone for the whole of London”.