Lethal legacy of dash for diesel

Air pollution is ‘killing 40,000 a year in the UK’

TOXINS emitted by Britain’s booming number of diesel cars are fuelling a health crisis that kills 40,000 people a year, a landmark report warns today.

Ownership of diesel cars has more than trebled in the past 15 years – driven by misguided government tax incentives that identified diesel as a ‘green’ fuel.

Today’s report by the Royal College of Physicians and the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health warns that the health impact of Britain’s air pollution is greater than previously thought. It calculates that 40,000 people in Britain die early each year because of outdoor air pollution, a significant increase on the previous estimate of 29,000.

Emissions from factories, power plants and traffic creates smog linked to asthma, heart disease, cancer, diabetes and dementia. Levels of air pollution are above legal limits in 25 British cities and last year the Supreme Court ordered the Government to take urgent action to reverse the situation.

The authors of the new report – led by the experts at the University of Southampton and Queen Mary University of London – said huge progress in some areas had been undermined by the dash for diesel.

‘In 2000, just 14 per cent of new cars were diesel powered, but today this figure has risen to 50 per cent, and almost all light goods vehicles and vans are now powered by diesel,’ they wrote. ‘The increasing popularity of diesel vehicles can undo the positive benefits from other policies to decrease air pollution.’

Diesel cars have been promoted as environmentally friendly since the 1970s because they emit less carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas that causes global warming. Successive governments have given drivers tax incentives to use them.

But in recent years, scientists have realised that diesel also produces more of the tiny particles and nitrogen oxides that are damaging to human health. A typical diesel vehicle emits ten times as much nitrogen dioxide as a petrol equivalent – and old diesel cars also produce hugely more levels of particles and other pollutants than petrol.

The report’s authors said: ‘Nitro-

‘A huge policy failure’

gen dioxide and particulates from diesel engines have been poorly controlled and these remain a problem.’

While diesel cars pass factory emissions tests, they do not replicate these standards when they get on the road. This issue was highlighted last year by the Volkswagen scandal, when the German car giant was found to have cheated emissions tests in the US.

No other companies have been found to have rigged the tests, but few firms have managed to match their factory tests on the road.

Alan Andrews, an environment lawyer with the campaign group Client Earth, said: ‘The drive to diesel has been a huge policy failure, leading to harmful and illegal levels of air pollution. It is one thing to embark on such a disastrous policy – but it was an even bigger blunder to continue to favour diesel despite the evidence.’

Professor Jonathan Grigg, a pae- diatrician at Queen Mary University of London and co-author of the report, said that with escalating NHS costs, it was ‘essential that policy makers consider the effects of long-term exposure on our children and the public purse’.

He called on the Government to monitor exposure to air pollution more effectively and urged the public to consider ways of reducing their own contribution by using public transport, walking, cycling and ‘not choosing to drive high-polluting vehicles’.

A Department for Transport spokesman said: ‘There have been major improvements in air quality over the past two decades and more than £2 billion has been invested in greener transport and other clean air measures since 2011 to improve it further.’

Britain was also leading action to ensure that ‘tests of all vehicles accurately represents performance out on the road’.