Neil Garratt's City Hall Diary - ULEZ showdown, levelling up and the new travel peak
If the case for outer London ULEZ is so clear, why doesn't the Mayor make it honestly? Plus the latest travel patterns and good news on Levelling Up in Belmont.
Hello,
Three stories this week:
ULEZ: an explosive week when the Mayor’s claims finally caught up with him
£14 million levelling up win for Belmont and the London Cancer Hub
Are Monday and Friday “peak” travel any more?
We covered the ULEZ confrontation in this week’s Inside City Hall podcast, so if you prefer you can hear all about it there. Search for “Inside City Hall” in your podcast app, use this link to listen on our website, or these two links to listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
Please do share or forward this newsletter to anyone else you think may be interested, it all helps to spread the word.
Why Isn’t The Mayor Honest About ULEZ?
And so we return to ULEZ.
Secret documents revealed last week that the Mayor and his Deputy repeatedly made false claims about the decision-making process, then in sustained questioning on Thursday we confronted him with that evidence.
You can watch the 4 minute highlights of that exchange here:
The full 30+ minute exchange is also on our YouTube channel.
So what was he trying to cover up? Well. The consultation was supposed to be independently run by TfL while the Mayor had to keep an open mind about the policy. Legally he must not be “pre-determined”. But we now know that his top political aids were crawling all over the consultation with weekly meetings to decide how it was run, and we know that the conclusions were run past the Mayor in September to get his nod two months before he officially made the decision.
With several London boroughs opposing the expansion and threatening legal measures to block it, proving that the Mayor was pre-determined or withheld crucial information may prove critical.
In October and again in November we repeatedly asked him if he knew anything about the consultation results and he repeatedly denied knowing anything. And we asked his Deputy Mayor for Transport if he knew anything, he also denied it.
But the confidential TfL documents tell a different story. You can read them yourself with the link below.
Further back, I challenged the Mayor in November if the case for expanding ULEZ London-wide is so clear, why doesn’t he make it openly and honestly? Why all the misleading claims? My question was ruled out of order for implying dishonesty, but the evidence is piling up.
Even before last week’s explosive FOI documents, the dishonest elements of Mayor’s case were multiple:
“ULEZ will give us clean air.” Not really. His own figures suggest that it will clean air in outer London by just 1% to 2%. That’s not nothing, but it’s not what you’d think if you hear to the Mayor tell it.
“The poorest Londoners don’t own cars.” Wrong. I asked ONS for the figures which they happily sent me and which the Mayor pointedly ignores (see them here).
“Air quality is a bigger problem in outer London.” No it isn’t, and it’s not even close. The map below shows the truth which is exactly what you’d expect.
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F57fbb3bc-60e2-4e3d-9586-a2e61f0707db_1152x744.png)
An honest case for expanding ULEZ to outer London would go something like this. Although air quality is already much better here than in central London, expanding ULEZ would improve it slightly and the Mayor thinks all the cost and hardship it will impose on people in outer London is worth it. But the Mayor never puts it that way.
He wants you to think that it will transform air in outer London and if you disagree then you don’t care about children’s lungs. He actually said that last part out loud on Thursday, by the way:
But we can now add a fourth dishonest claim:
In October then again in November he repeatedly denied knowing anything about the ULEZ consultation results. We now know he had a full briefing in September and his team were being briefed weekly throughout the summer.
“If expanding ULEZ to the whole of London is such a great idea, why does the Mayor have to be so misleading in the way he presents his flagship policy?” I tried to ask the Mayor that question back in November but it was ruled out of order.
The question still stands but I think we can now work the answer out for ourselves.
The New Off-Peak?
On a different topic, TfL data shows that work travel patterns are permanently changed. Although midweek commuting Tuesday to Thursday is busy again, Monday and Friday are stuck well below pre-pandemic levels.
It’s covered in the Evening Standard here, and although TfL data doesn’t include mainline trains, the pattern there is the same. People have voted with their feet. Or their Oyster Cards.
We quizzed TfL about this at Transport Committee on Wednesday and one big question is: are Monday and Friday mornings even still “peak”? If the point of higher peak fares is to encourage travel at quieter off-peak times, would it make sense to charge lower off-peak or even “shoulder peak” fares on those quieter mornings? Even though TfL are asking people to switch to Monday or Friday if they can, they weren’t interested in any fares changes.
But the big picture is that our transport system needs to be geared to the journeys people want to make, not the journeys people used to make 3 years ago.
Levelling Up Win
Ending with some good news, the Government announced last week the latest successful Levelling Up Fund bids to support local jobs and and economic growth. In Sutton, I was pleased to see the successful £14.1 million bid to upgrade the railway in Belmont from two trains per hour to four.
We’re not just boosting public transport in a poorly-served part of outer London, but unlocking the huge London Cancer Hub project. This hidden gem covers more than 50 acres and already hosts the renowned Royal Marsden Hospital, a major ICR research campus, with a new acute care hospital planned. When complete, it is set to be among largest cancer research sites in the world, second only to the MD Anderson campus in Texas.
But it’s hard to do all that on a site at the edge of London served by just 2 trains per hour! I’ve been pressing both Sutton Council and City Hall to take transport to this site seriously for years to avoid the growing site flooding nearby roads with parked cars, so it’s great to see a tangible upgrade at long last.
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2a95b2f9-face-4fb9-9a60-6b8fddf42249_1200x899.jpeg)
The Mayor has also promised more bus services to the Cancer Hub as part of his bus review, but so far there’s no sign of that so I will continue to bang my well-worn drum.
That’s it for this week, thank you for reading and remember to share my newsletter with others you think may be interested.