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Air Quality: London

My Lords, I join other noble Lords in congratulating my noble friend on his success in the ballot and on initiating this debate. It enables us to raise a number of issues, particularly in relation to Transport for London, which is very difficult to do.

Many years ago, I had to drive home through what turned out to be the last real pea-soup British fog. It was a terrifying experience. I could barely see past the front end of my car. It brought home to me just how terrible the pollution at that time was. As my noble friend rightly pointed out in his opening speech, it was followed by clean air legislation and over the years there was a considerable improvement in the quality of air. However, the other night I drove from the other side of the river to Piccadilly and that brought home to me very forcefully how terrible the level of pollution now is. I had to suffer it because in the course of that journey I was diverted all along the embankment, right the way back. With the journey I had to take, the pollution which the car I was in was creating was very serious, due to the diversions. I stress as strongly as I can that the policies being adopted by Transport for London are making a very considerable contribution to the problems which we are facing, and I will deal with four particular aspects of it.

The first is roadworks. We constantly see serious congestion and pollution caused by roadworks which have no one working on them. This can go on for a very long time. We had a classic example the other side of Parliament Square in Great George Street, where Transport for London had decided to bring in a bicycle lane. It started the initial work, and the capacity of the road was reduced as a result. For weeks, absolutely nothing happened and the pollution and congestion got worse and worse. This was typical of the way in which roadworks are begun without a clear plan to make sure they are carried through without an interruption, creating disruption as a result of the work which ought to be done not being done. It is very important to stress that that level of roadworks should be worked on 24 hours a day. Clearly, there will be increased costs, but none the less, it will greatly reduce the amount of congestion and pollution if instead of just working a few hours a day, we concentrate on them on a 24-hours-a-day basis.

The second thing I want to talk about, as other noble Lords have done, is bicycle lanes, because it is clear that the action being taken on these has substantially reduced the capacity of roads in London and is increasing congestion. For example, on Lower Thames Street, they must all have died of carbon monoxide poisoning

long since. The bike lanes have been sectioned off so they cannot be used by other traffic under any circumstances.

I spend a great deal of my time in The Hague in Holland, and bicycle ownership per head there is far greater than it is here. They have bicycle lanes but they have not found it necessary to cordon them off in the way which is done in London, and they therefore have not suffered from the problems which we are suffering from. They back up the lack of barriers by a law which says that if you are a motorist and hit a cyclist, it is automatically your fault. However suicidal the cyclist may be, that law is enforced. None the less, their approach to bicycle lanes has been vastly better than the one which we have adopted in London.

I do not know what we can do about the situation. It is going to be very difficult, given the huge amount of money being spent on bicycle lanes, to put the matter right. We have seriously to argue, given that the number of cyclists using them outside the rush hour is very small, whether some forms of vehicles should be able to use them during the off-peak periods. It is also arguable that there is a serious problem here as far as emergency services are concerned, if there is a terrorist attack, because of the lack of space on the roads for emergency vehicles to get to any particular incident.

Thirdly, I turn to the question of buses. A few days ago I had occasion to drive from Westminster to Dulwich by way of the Oval and Camberwell Green. I had a very long journey with masses of pollution, and the reason was that there were enormous queues of buses. It was the middle of the day and there was virtually no one in them. The queue was some seven or eight buses long. Some of the buses were duplicate numbers because the old story, “You wait for hours and then they all arrive together”, is certainly true. It seems clear to me that the number of buses polluting and causing congestion in the middle of the day ought to be reduced, but there appears to be no plan for organising them in a way that would ensure that we did not get vast queues of buses causing problems.

Lastly, I turn, as my noble friends did earlier, to the question of minicabs. I found to my surprise some time ago that there is apparently no one who is able to control the number of minicabs. Minicabs now are not the old traditional kind of locally based cabs; they tend to be, as noble Lords have already referred to, Uber, an organisation that I believe is banned in a number of countries. There is an enormous increase in the number of minicabs adding to congestion. I do not know whether the Minister can tell us how many minicabs are now on the roads, what the increase has been and how that compares to the number of black cabs, but it is becoming a serious problem and adding to congestion.

Overall it is very difficult to raise these matters with Transport for London. More and more it is the case that TfL has become largely unaccountable. For example, I do not really know how one can get in touch with it about a specific blockage or roadworks not being worked on. TfL needs a helpline that would enable people to ring in and bring to its attention the many ways in which congestion is increasing in London, because one cannot get at the people who are responsible for controlling these matters.

Again, I thank my noble friend for initiating this debate. It has been extremely helpful. I hope we will manage to get a better policy regarding traffic in London.

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