Mayor of London Sadiq Khan plans to implement a new daily charge as well as a ‘pay per pile’ fee on the vast majority of vehicles in London.
London’s socialist mayor Sadiq Khan is considering to once again try and price motorists who use diesel and petrol vehicles out of London, planning an estimated new up to £2 a day “clean air” charge or a new ‘pay per mile’ scheme to encourage drivers to swap to electric cars and public transport. Regular road users could see bills of another £730 a year under the proposed scheme.
The Mayor’s Office has proposed four potential options to expand his net-zero green agenda in London – all of which will hit most London drivers in the pocket.
Khan has also announced as a third option that he is debating whether to impose an estimated £3.50 daily charge on drivers from outside of the capital for travelling in Greater London. The socialist mayor has said that electric cars will be most likely exempt from the charge which will be more than a bus fare, but this is not guaranteed, the Evening Standard reports.
Khan has not officially announced released the exact numbers for the new charges but has retweeted estimated numbers from media outlets that appear to be endorsements of the above figures.
The final potential option to threaten non-electric car drivers in London is the expansion of the ‘Ultra Low Emission Zone’ or ULEZ onto “the whole of Greater London”.
The ULEZ charge is a £12.50 daily green tax on all “cars, motorcycles, vans and specialist vehicles” up to 3.5 tonnes that enter the zone. This is on top of the existing daily congestion charge which is now £15 every day if you enter central London in a vehicle between 7 am and 10 pm – bar the period between Christmas and New Year’s Day.
The new threat to drivers comes as Khan announces London needs to cut 27% of car journeys in London by 2030 to meet his “net-zero” goals for the capital, with it being claimed by the Mayor’s office that 25% of London’s “carbon emissions now come from road transport”.
Speaking to Breitbart London Richard Tice, the leader of the political party Reform UK (formerly the Brexit Party) and ex-MEP condemned Khan’s ‘green’ policies.
“Khan continues to persecute the poorest in London with his flawed energy policies which will also cost jobs and benefit only the middle class”, Tice said.
Khan’s new policy announcement follows a long line of so-called green policies, which punish London’s drivers, particularly those he brands as the “dirtiest”. Alongside the ULEZ fee, Khan has implemented the ‘London Streetspace’ scheme which saw the closure or narrowing of some roads in London, replacing them with cycle lanes, which was implemented during the pandemic in 2020.
The ‘Streetspace’ scheme was been branded “seriously flawed” by High Court Justice Beverly Lang in January 2021. Lang accused the Khan administration of taking “advantage of the pandemic” to implement “radical” and permanent changes to London’s roads, the Daily Mail reports.
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