The Clean Air Zone in Greater Manchester - Is it Just Another Tax On Joe Public?

By Joshua Speed, Business Development Manager at Wing Mirror Man

The Clean Air Zone in Greater Manchester - A bit of background

In March 2020, the government issued a legal direction requiring the 10 Greater Manchester local authorities address what it called ‘the vehicle pollution problem’.

As a result, the 10 authorities via the Greater Manchester Combined Authority drew up plans to create a ‘charging zone’ - one of the biggest in Europe covering an area of around 493 square miles and charge certain types of vehicles for the pleasure and necessity of driving in Greater Manchester.

The Greater Manchester Clean Air Zone was due to come into force on 30 May 2022.

However, concerns about financial hardship for local people and the lack of availability of compliant vehicles led the Mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, and Greater Manchester authority leaders to ask the Government to lift its legal direction for the CAZ to be introduced as soon as possible. As a result,  earlier this year, the GMCA put the initiative on hold until further notice. It is now under review.

It then spent a reported £189,000 commissioning a company to put stickers over the 1,194 signs to tell motorists that the initiative had been put on hold for the foreseeable future.

What a great use of local tax payers’ money that was, eh? (Note to the public sector: it’s so easy to spend other people’s money, isn’t it? But it’s actually taxpayers' money).

It is also reported that the cameras will still be active and used to collect data on “how traffic has changed over the pandemic as well as evaluate how certain traffic affects pollution levels”. Fab, too.

So, which vehicles were going to be affected?

Vehicles such as buses, minibuses, coaches, taxis, private hire vehicles and heavy goods vehicles - but not cars, at least yet. We all know about ‘taxes’ and ‘charges’, though, don’t we? They start off small and are increased little by little year-on-year.

Surely with 30 million cars on the roads in the UK, cars would be the next target to be ‘charged’ in due course?

What are clean air zones?

A clean air zone (CAZ) is an area where the local authority is actively trying to improve the quality of the air. Clean air zones were originally conceived to affect only buses, taxes and lorries, but the thinking has now expanded to include private vehicles. In other words - the car you drive. It's part of the broader plan to improve air quality, which will see petrol and diesel cars phased out by 2030 with the demise of hybrid models five years later.

 
What types of clean air zones are there?

You'll come across two types of clean air zones – charging and non-charging.

Non-charging clean air zones work to improve air quality without imposing tariffs on vehicles entering the zone. This may include improving traffic flow management and public transport networks, encouraging the use of cycles and advising drivers to switch off our engines when we're parked up.

It's the soft approach - as opposed to the ‘charging Clean Air Zone’ approach which, as the name implies, takes a more direct approach by simply charging any liable vehicle that enters the zone.

This charge is usually based on a car's emissions, in London's ULEZ – which has a similar modus operandi to a CAZ – diesels that don't conform to Euro 6 and petrols that don't pass Euro 4 standards pay a fee.

 

So, what are the proclaimed benefits of a Clean Air Zone in Greater Manchester?

Will it help to reduce carbon emissions or is it just a ploy to generate more taxes from the good people of the region? In short, in my opinion, yes, it’s just another tax on Joe Public.

We can all agree with the general aim of trying to reduce air pollution in Greater Manchester, but what are the likely ramifications of at least the way that this Clean Air Zone initiative is likely to be implemented?

For a start, there’s no doubt in my mind that a Clean Air Zone, when it’s eventually introduced, will affect the sale of cars, vans and commercial vehicles going forward. Whether people want to admit it or not, it will affect most people in some way!

If a Clean Air Zone exists and you live in a Clean Air Zone, it will be more expensive to get a delivery.

To get your shopping delivered, it will be more expensive.

To get a taxi, it will be more expensive.

To get a builder round, who has to drive in or through the Clean Air Zone, it will be more expensive. Same with a plumber or electrician or if you need scaffolding put up. All will have to charge you, the consumer, more - due to the daily charges levied by the Clean Air Zone.

Every single job you can think of which requires a vehicle will cost you more if you live in a Clean Air Zone.

Even if you don’t have a commercial vehicle either directly or indirectly you will be charged more.

The cost for a commercial vehicle was planned to be £35 a day, £17 a day for taxis and Class 2 vehicles such as lorries and wagons would be £60 a day and if you don’t pay within 5 days, you would be fined £100.

They are exemptions for:

●       a vehicle that has ultra low emissions.

●       a disabled passenger tax class vehicle.

●       a disabled tax class vehicle.

●       a military vehicle.

●       a historic vehicle.

●       a vehicle retrofitted with technology accredited by the Clean Vehicle Retrofit Accreditation Scheme ( CVRAS ) and

●       certain types of agricultural vehicles.

Plus, there’s no recognition system in place for the CAZ. In other words, it’s not like a business can receive alerts when their drivers have entered the Clean Air Zone. You don’t know if there are cameras unless you are actively looking for them.  Instead, the driver has to know when he or she sees a camera (signifying they are in the CAZ) and has to remember to pay the charges - and on time.  If they forget to pay the charge or don’t pay them within five days, they are fined an amount above the charge.

So, if you drive a private hire vehicle, taxi or HGV, you have to drive around looking for the cameras that show you are in the Clean Air Zone - unlike, say Runcorn Bridge, a 1.4 mile road where the tolls are displayed very clearly to drivers and it’s easy to pay them online.

So, it’s basically a glorified tax, to me.

Will it ultimately fulfil its purpose of reducing carbon emissions?

No. I don’t believe it will.

It’s a joint venture between the Government and the car industry to persuade people to go and buy an electric or hybrid car or at least a new petrol or diesel vehicle which has far fewer emissions.

What they are saying is that car manufacturers prior to a certain date produce cars with more emissions than more modern cars (due to catalytic converters and other reasons) and they don’t want these older cars on our roads.

Technically, it is cheaper to charge an electric car than fill a petrol or diesel car up with fuel.

At least for the moment, it is free to charge in lots of places such as campsites, hotels and some workplaces.

But it won’t be free forever, will it?

But then the cost of electric vehicles is much higher than new petrol or diesel cars and I suspect most average families are finding the prices prohibitively expensive.

Can you also imagine petrol stations becoming electric charging stations?

Every morning on your way to work there are queues of people waiting 20 minutes or more to charge their car because they forgot to do it the night before? It would be chaos.

Here’s a recent example. At a local workplace, we’ve heard the following scenario.

They installed two spaces to charge electric vehicles in an 80-space car park while people are at work. It's now a fight every work day for who can get to those points and as a result people leaving home earlier and earlier. The infrastructure required to support the charging of millions of electric vehicles just hasn’t been thought through properly.

Let’s Look At The Bigger Picture

The CAZ is part of the Government’s Net Zero Agenda. Many people are now calling Net Zero, Net Stupid. Whilst most of us want to live  and work with less pollution, we have to surely consider the bigger picture.

China already has more than 1,000 coal-fired power stations and is building 80 more this year alone! How much CO2 will those existing power stations be belting out and how much will the new 80 power stations add to the world’s CO2?

Our attempts in the UK to reduce carbons emissions by turning down the central heating a few degrees, getting solar panels, or trying to buy an unaffordable electric car will surely be completely offset by what China is pumping out in the world’s atmosphere?

The ‘King of Scotland’, also known as GB News’ social commentator, Neil Oliver, believes that one of the results of the Government’s obsession with Net Zero is that not all people who currently drive a petrol or diesel vehicle will migrate to an electric vehicle - and that’s an outcome, he believes, that the Government actually wants to see! In other words, the Government realises and accepts and perhaps even wants the scenario where only the rich or well-off in our society will have a car (an electric one, of course) whilst many of those of us who currently drive a petrol or diesel car may not own a car in the future. We ‘plebs’ will presumably have to rely on our fragmented, expensive and antiquated public transport system. Yippee, de.

In conclusion

Personally, I believe we need a much longer timeframe (longer than 2050) to find a mix of alternative energy sources that don’t produce as much air pollution as petrol and diesel.

The current time frame to 2050 may seem a lifetime away but all predictions are that it will cause major disruption, expense and inconvenience to the majority of people in this country if we rush to make the proposed changes to our daily lives by that arbitrary deadline.

What we come up with, eventually, should not involve constantly taxing people driving vehicles, though, who are already ‘cash cows’ for the Exchequer due to ridiculously high duty on petrol and diesel.

As ‘net zero’ or the so-called ‘climate emergency’ narrative seems to have gone mainstream and many people have bought into it, I won't hold my breath for that, though.

-Ends-

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