Clean air zone Council to spend up to £12million on signs and cameras
BRISTOL City Council is set to spend nearly £12million on installing road signs, cameras and enforcement systems for a clean air zone.
The move follows a legal directive from the government to introduce a clean air zone (CAZ) with “additional measures” – not necessarily a diesel ban – by April 1 next year.
Officers have recommended that members of the ruling Labour administration approve the spending of £13.25million of extra government funding so it can follow the government’s orders.
The council must submit more evidence to support its proposed diesel ban, along with evidence for alternatives, such as charging private cars, which are excluded from CAZ charges under the current proposals.
That work will cost an estimated £1.25million, which will come out of the £13.25million the Labour cabinet is expected to approve at its virtual meeting on April 28.
The remaining £12million will cover the installation of enforcement equipment and street works needed for a CAZ, as well as project management and monitoring costs, cabinet papers show.
Another £4million would have been needed to introduce the proposed diesel ban.
The costs do not include the money that will have to be spent on non-charging components of the overall programme, such as a diesel scrappage scheme, or measures to reduce the impact on citizens and businesses, such as grants, loans and concessions.
Cabinet papers show that £7.15million of the implementation funding will be spent on the CAZ enforcement system and £4.45million on associated street works.
Street works include cameras and road signs, according to the council’s outline business case submitted to the government in November last year.
Enforcement equipment includes fixed enforcement devices, an enforcement vehicle, and a central control facility.
Under the council’s proposed CAZ, older, more polluting commercial vehicles would be charged a daily fee to enter the zone.
Taxis, private-hire vehicles, and commercial vans and minibuses would be charged £9 per day, while buses, coaches and heavy-goods vehicles would pay £100 a day.
All privately owned diesel cars would be banned from entering a small zone in the inner city between 7am and 3pm each day.
If the government rejects the ban, and insists that the council include private cars in a CAZ instead, drivers of older, polluting diesel and petrol cars would likely have to pay a daily charge of £9 a day to enter a small or mediumsized zone.
Fines of £60 would be issued to drivers who enter the CAZ without paying. They would be caught using automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) cameras.
In November 2019, the council estimated its proposed CAZ and diesel ban would run at a loss to begin with, but would generate a net profit of £68million in fines and charges once it had bedded in.
The profit would be put back into measures to clean up the city’s air.
The government ordered the council, along with 24 other local authorities, to reduce its nitrogen dioxide to legal levels as quickly as possible in 2017.