ULEZ comes to Heathrow on 29th August – you may need to pay £12.50 to drive to the airport

This article is closed to new comments. Feel free to ask your question in the HfP forums.

• Paul says:

  24 Aug24 August 10:29

  Well I fully back ULEZ and the whining from the MAGAesque over tax grabs and other nonsense is now beyond parody. It’s for the health of your children and your children;s children.

  • Peter says:

    24 Aug24 August 12:09

    Same here!

  • Jack says:

    24 Aug24 August 13:58

    All the evidence has shown it is not going to make one bit of difference to anything . Tfl altered the figures to suit them and charging people doesn’t achieve anything

• Nick says:

  24 Aug24 August 10:35

  The inclusion of Heathrow is clearly and simply about money making. For all those who travel from outside the M25 a few times a year with family and luggage, the car is by far the cheapest and most convenient option typoicall less than half the cost of ublic transprt with the huge benefit of being avialble in the evnet of the very frequent delays, strikes etc etc. That journey of less than two miles each way from the M25/M4 to the car parks will caase almost no measurebale impact on air quality, but nets a handy 25 quid for kahn and his profligate friends at tfl – after all, someone has to pay for the fleet of armoured range rovers that ferry this failed ex-lawyer to the shops and back. The idrea that a ulez charge of 25 quid 3-4 four times a year will drive someone who lives well outside london to change their car is laughable – it’s purely abut exploiting those who have no choice but to park at Heathrow. Hopefully someone is already looking at building car parks on the western side of the M25 to deny kahn the money he will only otherwise waste.

  • Lady London says:

    24 Aug24 August 10:56

    Well said Nick.

    • Nick says:

      24 Aug24 August 11:17

      It’s about fairness, it’s justified by covering the whole of Greater London with exemptions only where access reasons make them necessary (along with the infrastructure already existing with LEZ). Excluding Heathrow would have created all sorts of other issues and begging requests elsewhere.

      It’s a charge not a tax, and is entirely optional. Choose not to pollute and you won’t pay. We all benefit from cleaner air.

  • jjoohhnn says:

    24 Aug24 August 12:28

    So do you think the HAL are getting some kind of kickback from TFL for allowing this on their roads if it’s about money making? The M25 exit towards T5 is excluded from ULEZ. Stanwell Moor Road is excluded from ULEZ. Inside that is within Heathrow’s boundary – western perimeter road, for example. This is included within the ULEZ. Heathrow airport is the ‘traffic authority’ for this area within the London Borough of Hillingdon. So what’s HAL’s incentive to allow the ULEZ on its land when they could still allow journeys to the airport without people having to pay?

• JP says:

  24 Aug24 August 10:36

  It’s a cash grab from the hopelessly out of touch Khan. The facts simply don’t support his narrative.

  • BA Flyer IHG Stayer says:

    24 Aug24 August 11:38

    And the facts don’t support yours.

  • dougzz99 says:

    24 Aug24 August 13:42

    Hopelessly out of touch. You mean you disagree and rather than make actual points around why you just sling mud.

  • Rui N. says:

    24 Aug24 August 15:26

    This type of primary school “argument” is always so funny (and really sad) to see coming from adults. “Mommy I did bad in my test, but the other children did worst!”. What is the importance of pollution levels in other cities to the air that we breathe?

• TimM says:

  24 Aug24 August 10:52

  A great can of worms has been opened here.

  As has been repeatedly pointed out, improving local air quality has little to do with hitting climate change targets. Even switching to electric vehicles will not clean up the air by itself due to the pollutants from tyres grinding on the roads.

  The UK Government has been told it is in breach of safe air quality standards for decades. The current approach to air quality, as with all unpopular decisions like spending cuts, closing hospitals etc., is to devolve these unpleasant things to the relevant local authority so that they get the blame.

  The metropolitan authorities are legally obliged to make steady progress on air pollution but have very few tools to do it. Hence we have regressive charges like the ULEZ.

  For the contributor who said that people may have to use a non-compliant car to attend a hospital appointment, the NHS always provides transport to those are otherwise unable to attend.

  An estimated 10% of vehicles within the extended zone are affected by ULEZ but what an extreme amount of hot air it has caused. These vehicles did not ought to on the road in the first place. One little nudge to encourage more ‘moral’ behaviour and see the backlash.

  Walking, cycling, e-scooters and public transport combined with better civil planning, increased home-working and home deliveries are all upon us. Private cars are on their way out for multitudes of reasons.

  • Stu_N says:

    24 Aug24 August 12:09

    Well said TimM. This is aimed at taking the dirtiest 10% of vehicles off the streets. City air is basically a slow acting poison and I celebrate anything that is being done to clean it up.

    If you’ve ever had the misfortune to walk or cycle alongside a vintage car rally you’ll appreciate the huge change in noticeable car emissions in the last 30 years. Visible soot and unburnt petrol/ oil fill the air and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The invisible particles and CO/NOx have also decreased massively. This is just next incremental step, it’s been coming for years and if a 15 year old petrol car is ULEZ-compatible it’s hard to see how anyone is priced off the road by this.

  • Nick says:

    24 Aug24 August 12:39

    Public transport works in densly populated urban areas. I live two miles from the nearest bus stop – unfirtunately it goes to a nearby town at 10am and returns at 3pm – not exacftly practical for anything. Putting my weekly shop or perhaps some DIY materials (paint, bag of sand, a door) on an e-scooter would be impractical even if they were legal. Remeneberr that only hire scheme e-scooters are a legal menace, all privately owned illegal fire hazard e-scooters should be impounded by the police. Perhaps kahn will spend some his ill-gotten millions from ulez on ridding the treets of illegal scooters? Thought not…

    • Adam says:

      24 Aug24 August 13:19

      This was a post about London, where the public transport network is relatively good. Agree that it’s shocking elsewhere in the country, largely due to the utter failure of privatisation. It can and should be dramatically improved, so that people do not need to rely on their cars to the same degree they do now.

      There’s always going to be a need for a car/van for certain point-to-point trips, but most people aren’t buying bags of sand or a door every weekend, and you can have these things quickly delivered. The vast majority of car trips taken are short and require little to no cargo space.

      We should be doing everything we can to reduce the number of private cars journeys – the best way to achieve this is by making it easier for people to get around without a car, which has a bonus side effect of making the country a far nicer, safer, healthier place to live.

• Roy says:

  24 Aug24 August 10:55

  But then most people will discover that they’re not affected, and they won’t like that at all, as then they’ll have nothing to complain about!

• His Holyness says:

  24 Aug24 August 11:01

  Allegedly 500 ULEZ are out of action in Southeast London 😂

• Stuart says:

  24 Aug24 August 12:33

  Just checked my car. Although my road tax is £0 as my diesel Fiesta is in the lowest emission band, I assume I’m stung because it’s in 09 plate. Bought new and still getting about 65 mile/gallon on my daily commute so a bit suprised it does not meet ULEZ levels (or not really so Khan can fleece me more).

  • Adam says:

    24 Aug24 August 12:40

    It’s not about fuel economy, it’s about emissions, both particulates and NOx, and the effect these have on health. Unfortunately, many diesel engines are very poor in this department. The same reason many older motorcycles aren’t compliant – they’re terrible for NOx.

    • Stuart says:

      24 Aug24 August 13:09

      But the car is in the lowest emissions band so I pay zero road tax, which is what I said before mentioning the mpg.

      • Adam says:

        24 Aug24 August 13:24

        Unfortunately that’s based on CO2 emissions, not particulate/NOx, which is what ULEZ is targeting.

      • dougzz99 says:

        24 Aug24 August 13:34

        So you accuse Khan of fleecing you without any understanding whatsoever of what ULEZ targets, interesting.

      • Roy says:

        25 Aug25 August 22:33

        That’s the CO2 emissions band. It’s a fairly pointless notion that’s essentially pretty much equivalent to fuel efficiency.

        It tells you how much your carbon footprint is (but so does fuel efficiency) but it tells you absolutely nothing about how many toxins it’s pumping out into the local environment…

  • James Harper says:

    24 Aug24 August 18:02

    We have an old Polo with an 04 plate and that’s compliant.

• A says:

  24 Aug24 August 12:35

  ULEZ reporting is an example of the media brainwashing people.
  Why do these tramps with non-ulez compliant cars not blame the car manufacturers??? Since 2012 BMW gave it as an option to order their diesel car with a ulez compliant emission rating. It was an option so they would happily sell you a car (in London) with a limited effective lifespan. Nobody in the media wants to risk losing the incumbent car maker ad spend so it’s never spun this way.
  Legacy car makers going to see what happened to kodak real fast.

  • His Holyness says:

    24 Aug24 August 12:41

    Because the media have people going round in circles. You’re unfamiliar with the dash for diesel?
    Brown set VED lower for cars with lower carbon emissions which favoured more fuel efficient diesel cars… so more were sold meaning there was more deadly air pollution.
    Diesels exploded cos… science.

    • Londonsteve says:

      26 Aug26 August 23:24

      And those diesels have retained their ultra low road tax rates and continue to emit lower levels of carbon dioxide, which is a good thing. That’s the reason the tax is low. ULEZ has nothing to do with carbon dioxide emissions, we’ve since discovered that particulate emissions and NOX are highly harmful for human health, bit like when CFCs were discovered to be punching a hole in the ozone layer. You can still drive an efficient, low CO2 emitting diesel, just not in the centre of a crowded city (unless you pay, in order to dissuade you from doing it).

  • JohnG says:

    24 Aug24 August 15:16

    It really is depressing how easily, and effectively, right-wing media can tell their audience what to think and watch them parrot it blindly. The in-laws were ranting about Khan and the ULEZ a couple of weeks ago. They live 2 hours from London and haven’t travelled within the expanded ULEZ since before COVID and even then it was perhaps once a year at most. They knew a considerable amount about it, given the complete irrelevence to their life, and were animated about it; “Don’t ask us to drop you at Heathrow” (which they’ve literally never done and would make no sense). You know what they didn’t know? That both the cars they have, and never drive into London, were ULEZ compliant so they wouldn’t have to pay anyway.

    Guess what was sat on their sofa? The Daily Mail with a frontpage story about how awful the ULEZ expansion was.

    • Roy says:

      24 Aug24 August 18:03

      What surprises me is the proportion of HfP readers that appear (based on their posts) to be Daily Mail readers. This seems completely at odds with the demographics that Rob always claims for this site.

      • Roy says:

        24 Aug24 August 18:48

        I mean that may be slightly unfair, but ..

        I’m not surprised that there’s a large element of denial amongst the readership of a website that heavily focuses on one of the most carbon-intensive personal pursuits there is … And I’m sure I’m guilty of that to a degree, too. But what shocks me is the degree of Trumpian false narratives being promoted in order to justify not giving a f*** about the consequences of our actions.

        I genuinely don’t think I could survive more that five minutes at an HfP party before having to leave – I’m surprised they’re so popular…

        • yorkieflyer says:

          24 Aug24 August 20:42

          Re CO2, do you really think that what we do in our little island will make the slightest difference to climate change?
          ULEZ is about air quality, a different matter and the article is specifically about the inclusion of the UK’s busiest airport when it is on the fringe of the ULEZ zone. In my view it is quite iniquitous that travellers with no intention of otherwise being in Greater London are being dragged into the net, as others have commented, Heathrow possibly playing games to curry favour?

        • Rob says:

          24 Aug24 August 20:52

          The parties generally attract the ‘liberal metropolitan elite’ segment of the HfP readership 🙂

      • Rob says:

        24 Aug24 August 20:56

        We can literally tell you what newspapers HfP readers read (and the cars they drive). All this data is available to us, in aggregate. What I don’t understand is why you think the sub 1% of readers who comment (let’s assume our hard core readership is 50,000 people) are representative of the whole.

        • Roy says:

          24 Aug24 August 21:29

          Then you’ll know that I drive a Tesla which, AFAIK, is exempt from the ULEZ. I certainly hope it is, anyway, as I’ve lived in the ULEZ zone for almost two years and have never actually paid the ULEZ even once!

          And I’ve no idea how else you expect me to judge HfP readership other than by the interactions I have with them. Point taken, though – comments aren’t necessarily representative!

      • JohnG says:

        24 Aug24 August 23:01

        It’s more the typical tendency of some people to be a todger online. Plenty of wealthy people read the Mail, especially those on the Barry blimp end of the spectrum.

This article is closed to new comments. Feel free to ask your question in the HfP forums.