Harrow say they will protect their poorest and most vulnerable residents from Khan’s stealth tax. See Harrow Council’s Leader Paul Osborn’s response below.
Dear Sadiq,
Thank you for your recent letter regarding the ULEZ expansion.
Firstly, I am very glad to hear that you spend everyday working with the Metropolitan Police, Transport for London, and the London Fire Brigade. It is important that you focus your time with these organisations, especially as they have all gone into special measures or bankruptcy under your mayoralty.
Each day I am mindful of the families in Harrow who are struggling to get by day to day, due to the present economic difficulties brought about by Putin's invasion of Ukraine and the ongoing fallout from the Covid pandemic. The cost of heating and eating has risen considerable in the last year, which has had dramatic effect on people's lives and on their families.
It is these lives and these families and their children who will be devastatingly affected by having to potentially pay £87.50 per week just to use their cars to get to school, work, the doctors or just to get food. By hitting the poorest and most vulnerable people in our society, as well as struggling businesses, you are making the choices they face even harder.
The prospect of your ULEZ expansion has had a serious adverse effect on many of my residents' mental health. They cannot afford to replace their vehicles, which they are reliant on, and they will also struggle to pay your ULEZ tax. Your indifference for their financial situation has left many of our poorest residents and struggling businesses filled with anxiety.
You, like us, had a cost-of-living summit within the last few weeks. Local people were very concerned about the cost of ULEZ at the Harrow Council summit, a concern which was raised by Martin Lewis CBE, founder of MoneySavingExpert.com, at your event.
I agree we must do more to improve air quality in London, but the ULEZ expansion, according to TfL's own data, is not the answer.
Instead of pursuing an expensive and unnecessary expansion of ULEZ, I hope you would work with me to help clean up the dirty air by upgrading London's bus fleet to reduce pollution as well as increasing the number of bus services so that people have more reliable and sustainable alternatives. You could have also chosen to invest more in electric vehicle charging infrastructure.
You could use the ULEZ funding to support local authorities with replacing older vehicles or modernising public buildings to be greener. You could use the funding to support residents with replacing gas boilers with more modern and greener alternatives.
You claim that income from the ULEZ will 'fall to nominal levels within the next few years'. This is likely true, but only when you are using the current compliance criteria. I doubt very much that you would spend £200 million expanding the ULEZ only to achieve 'nominal income'. Many of my concerned residents have said to me that they believe once the ULEZ infrastructure is installed, they fully expect that the goalposts will be moved to include tens of thousands of currently compliant vehicles into this scheme. This is a suspicion I fully share.
Please understand and respect that I will not sit by while residents in Harrow are forced to choose between paying your ULEZ tax or heating and eating.
I hope you will reconsider this ill-conceived expansion and chose instead to work constructively with us to put residents first.
Kind regards,
Councillor Paul Osborn
Leader of Harrow Council
Source: Harrow Council Conservatives face book group.
TAXI LEAKS UPDATE:
Just seen this on YouTube, it slaughters Sadiq Khan's argument and is a must watch.
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