M-way limit may be cut to 60mph
Lower speeds could tackle air pollution, claim ministers – but critics say plans are a ‘cop out’
SPEED limits on busy motorways could be cut from 70mph to 60mph as part of Whitehall plans to curb air pollution.
Officials say vehicles travelling at faster speeds emit more toxic nitrogen oxides, which can cause respiratory illnesses.
The lower speed limits – if introduced – would be targeted at stretches of motorway with the worst air quality.
The proposals, buried in the Government’s clean air strategy, were greeted with dismay by motoring campaigners, who questioned the apparent environmental benefits and pointed out that British motorway speed limits would be among the lowest in Europe.
But environmental campaigners and opposition MPs still blasted the Government’s anti-pollution plans as a ‘cop out’. Some suggested proposals had been watered down ahead of the general election to avoid alienating millions of diesel drivers.
In the draft anti-pollution plans, published yesterday, ministers offered hope to drivers of diesel cars, saying councils should only impose charging zones in town centres as a last resort.
They also suggested 15,000 drivers of highly-polluting vehicles could benefit from a diesel scrappage scheme – giving them £8,000 to buy a cleaner car – although this would be targeted at those on the lowest incomes. Councils were told to consider a range of antipollution measures – as it emerged around 40 local authorities have at least one road which will breach air quality laws for years to come if no action is taken.
Ministers were forced to come up with a new strategy for cutting air pollution after the High Court ruled that existing plans were insufficient to meet EU law.
The draft proposals were published after the Government lost a legal bid to delay them until after the election next month. The final strategy will be outlined at the end of July after a consultation.
The Prime Minister blamed the last Labour government for encouraging motorists to buy diesel cars – which were supposedly cleaner as they emitted less carbon dioxide – by reforming vehicle duty.
Scientists have since performed a U-turn, warning that diesels produce more dangerous nitrogen oxides and sooty particulates.
Theresa May said: ‘What we want to ensure is that we are getting the balance right here between deliv- ering the air quality improvement that we need, but recognising that there are a lot of people who went out and bought diesel cars because the last Labour government said that was the thing to do.’
Buried in one of the documents is the proposal for lower motorway speed limits. It says there is evidence to suggest that ‘vehicles travelling at high speeds emit greater levels of NOX (nitrogen oxides) the faster they travel’.
But the Government admitted ‘there is uncertainty in this area
and the evidence would benefit from further monitoring in real world conditions’. Howard Cox, of campaign group FairFuelUK, claimed the economy could suffer if the plans were implemented.
‘It’s not clear that dropping from 70 to 60 will reduce emissions but the impact on the economy could be significant,’ he said.
‘Small vehicle delivery times, representing the UK’s fastest area of commercial growth due to internet shopping, would be affected significantly. The UK would have one of the slowest motorway speed limits in the EU if adopted.’
But the strategy did offer hope for drivers of Britain’s 12million diesel cars, who were worried about extra charges. There were fears local councils would emulate London’s Labour Mayor Sadiq Khan, who plans to charge diesel drivers £24 a day to enter the city centre.
But ministers have dropped plans to give councils free rein over the establishment of ‘clean air zones’ and charges that can be levied. Instead, local authorities will have to get a ministerial signoff before implementing such a scheme. The Government told councils not to penalise those who bought diesels ‘in good faith’ – saying charges should only be imposed where there is no alternative.
Other ideas could include removing speed humps to stop cars slowing and accelerating, and changing the ‘sequencing’ of traffic lights to improve vehicle flow.
However, critics said ministers were simply shifting responsibility on to councils. Ed Davey, Lib Dem candidate for Kingston and Surbiton, said: ‘This is not a plan, it’s a cop out. Instead of bold commitments to improve air quality, the Government is hiding behind yet another consultation and passing the buck to local authorities.’
Oliver Hayes, of charity Friends of the Earth, added: ‘If reports are true and these plans have been watered down because of the general election, ministers will have shown a shocking disregard for protecting people’s health.’
DURING the summer of 2000, in the run-up to Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother’s 100th birthday, I asked the Duke of Edinburgh if he was hoping to reach 100. ‘Good God, no,’ he spluttered, ‘I can’t imagine anything worse. What a ghastly idea.’
‘ You might make it,’ I suggested, encouragingly.
‘No, thank you,’ he said firmly. ‘Bits are already dropping off.’
Seventeen years on, and a month away from his 96th birthday on June 10, Prince Philip still appears to be in one piece.
This week (when his diary included ten public engagements), he announced that he will retire from official duties at the end of the summer, but it certainly isn’t on grounds of health. I doubt you will find a fitter man in his mid-90s anywhere.
I saw him earlier in the week. He walks without a stick, at a pace, with a spring in his step and he is as sparky as he ever was.
I have known him, off and on, for more than 40 years, since I first became involved in the work of one of his pet charities, the National Playing Fields Association.
He is retiring, quite simply, so that he can spend some time doing the things he wants to when he wants to.
Prince Philip prides himself on being a realist. He knows he is not going to live for ever. As the man who has overseen the fabric of all the Royal Palaces since the Queen’s coronation in 1953, he is currently being kept abreast of the plans for the multi-millionpound refurbishment of Buckingham Palace.
At the meetings, I gather, he alternates between focusing on the details and bleating: ‘I’ll be dead before this has even started — dead, do you hear me?’
One of his family once told me: ‘Philip isn’t sentimental, but he is sensitive, profoundly so.’ He is very aware that he has reached the age when friends and contemporaries do die. A fortnight ago he attended the memorial service for his former brother-in-law Antony Armstrong- Jones, the Earl of Snowdon.
When I saw him on Tuesday, it was at a service to celebrate the life of his librarian and archivist, Dame Anne Griffiths, who had worked for him for 42 years.
Last year, he was at the funeral of one of his closest friends, his former private secretary Sir Brian McGrath. Barely a morning goes by that he doesn’t read the obituary of somebody he knows. The dying never stops. PRINCE
Philip is indeed an unsentimental realist. He is also, in his own phrase, ‘a pragmatist, not a romantic’. When he said to a well-wisher on Thursday he was standing down because he ‘couldn’t stand up much longer’, it wasn’t wholly a joke.
He knows that, with time, he will inevitably get frailer. He has always taken pride in his appearance, but wearing the heavy bearskin worn by the Colonel of the Grenadier Guards, for example, as he has done up to his 90s, simply isn’t going to be possible as he approaches his centenary.
He is bowing out of the limelight before the Press can chronicle his increasing deterioration. He admits he is a little hard of hearing and confesses to memory lapses. ‘ I forget names,’ he says. ‘It’s frustrating.’
He does not want to give the media the opportunity to report any inadvertent lapses or slips of the tongue.
He loathes the reputation he has of being the princely gaffeman. As he told me once: ‘On a foreign trip, my heart sinks if I see there are British Press coming, too. All they are waiting for is a so-called gaffe.’
Prince Philip can be impatient (he has been heard to say ‘take the f***ing photograph’ to more than one dilatory snapper), but he is not impetuous. He thinks things through and the timing of his retirement at the end of the summer has been carefully considered.
It marks exactly 70 years since he was created Duke of Edinburgh upon his marriage to Princess Elizabeth in 1947. Seventy years is threescoreyear-and- ten, the biblical lifespan, and Prince Philip has, literally, given a lifetime’s service to his sovereign and the country.
He reckons it is time now to make way for the next generation. The future of the monarchy matters to him. He is delighted with the way Prince William and Prince Harry are ‘shaping up’.
Prince Philip is conscious of his place in the heritage of the Royal Family. ( Collating and studying family trees i s one of his less wellpublicised enthusiasms.) One hundred and twenty years ago, in 1897, his mother, aged 12, attended Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee.
People sometimes think of the Duke of Edinburgh as an outsider (‘Phil the Greek’, born in Corfu).
But his mother, Princess Alice, was born at Windsor Castle, the daughter of Princess Victoria, one of Queen Victoria’s favourite granddaughters. And his father’s father, George I of Greece, was an aide de camp to Queen Victoria — and later to King Edward VII ( who married Philip’s great-aunt Alexandra) and, later still, to George V (whose granddaughter Philip married). UNLIKE the Queen (whose mother was an aristocrat but not royal), Prince Philip is royal to the marrow — related on both sides to kings, queens, emperors, kaisers and tsars.
Prince Philip believes in the value of the monarchy, and if we regard the Queen’s reign as a success (and most of us do), the joint author of that success has been the Duke of Edinburgh.
He has been there from the start. In February 1952, it was he who broke the news to the 25-year-old Princess Elizabeth
that her father had died and she was now Queen. From that day until this week he has been there for her — and for us.
Privately, of course, he will still be there for the Queen, but, publicly, much less so.
I reckon that he will continue to pop up at her side on occasion when he wants to (and when she needs him), but from now on, as a rule, Her Majesty will be seen more often accompanied by one of her children. Sometimes it may be Prince Andrew (the more the Press vilify ‘Airmiles Andy’, the more protective his mother feels towards him), sometimes it will be Prince Edward (who will be recreated as Duke of Edinburgh when Prince Philip finally dies).
I have no doubt that the Queen will miss her husband as she goes about her official duties.
I recall attending a Royal Variety Performance (one duty the Duke of Edinburgh will certainly be happy to be shot of) and, during the interval, in a crowded theatre bar, watching the Queen surrounded by eager showbusiness types, Prince Philip was standing on the far side of the room watching Her Majesty, too.
Suddenly, across the crowded room, he caught her eye, smiled and raised his glass. They have been good companions for 70 years.
When I wrote a biography of the royal couple, I spent some days travelling around the country with them. Following in the car behind theirs at the end of the day, it was touching to see them side by side in the car in front, chatting animatedly, going through the day’s events, the Duke doing most of the talking and invariably making the Queen laugh.
He is a funny man. He once said: ‘If ever you see a man opening the car door for his wife, it’s either a new car or a new wife.’
Inevitably, his sense of humour is not to everybody’s taste and now and again he rubs an over-sensitive soul up the wrong way. He likes to challenge people and keep them on their toes.
He is wilfully contradictory and, occasionally, he can be irascible. He can be a little frightening, too.
On several occasions I have spoken alongside him at fundrais-ing events at Buckingham Palace. Without exception, he has barracked my speeches with caustic asides. ‘ Get on with it, man. We’ve heard that one before. What are you saying now? None of this is true.’ While the crowd laughed, I quaked.
Prince Philip’s principal role since 1952 has been to support the Queen. Alongside that, he has created his own working life as founder, fellow, patron, president, chairman, or member of at least 837 organisations — as well as a Colonel or Colonel-in-Chief, Field Marshal, Admiral, Air Commodore 42 times over.
He has survived 70 years of royal flummery: parades, processions, receptions, lunches, dinners — upwards of 22,000 official engagements.
He has measured out his life in handshakes and small-talk. And to keep his sanity, along with the surface stuff (necessary, unavoida-ble), he has got stuck in to a range of projects where in- depth involvement has given him the satisfaction of a job well done. HIS
STylE is distinctive. It’s proactive and practical: he is a details man. I once visited a sports facility with him in Merseyside. His debriefing note to me was brief and to the point. We’d put the lavatories and changing rooms in the wrong place.
When I wrote his biography of him, his staff (the leanest team at Buckingham Palace) kindly supplied me with a mass of mate-rial detailing his achievements.
It was all there, from his 6,000 hours of flying time as a pilot (perversely, though as a naval officer he was mentioned in dispatches during the war, he sometimes says he’d rather have been in the Air Force than the Navy) to his books on competition carriage-driving, from the creation of the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award to the conversion of the new lunch room at Sandringham — thousands of accomplishments, great and small, a remarkable record of a frantically busy life effectively and well spent.
The Duke is relatively comforta-ble with people saluting what he has done, but much less so with any acknowledgement of who he is. Once, when we were talking about Diana, Princess of Wales, he made the point that it is danger-ous to take personally the attention that comes your way as a member of the Royal Family. It is your position that puts you in the limelight, he explained — and nothing else.
He said to me: ‘ you won’t remember this, but in the first years of the Queen’s reign, the level of adulation — you wouldn’t believe it. you really wouldn’t. It could have been corroding. It would have been very easy to play to the gallery, but I took the conscious decision not to do that. Safer not to be too popular. you can’t fall too far.’
Well, like it or not, here he is, more than halfway through his tenth decade, and, judging from the Press and public reaction to this week’s announcement, more popular than ever.
Those who know him personally know him for what he is: determined, disciplined, resilient, clear- sighted, bloody- minded, funny, thoughtful, kind, pragmatic, decent, honest, hard- working, obstinate, perverse. And those who don’t, simply know him as the man who has stood by the Queen through seven decades — ‘ quite simply’, in her words, ‘ as my strength and stay all these years’.
Prince Philip says, with a wry laugh: ‘I’ll be dead soon.’ But not too soon, I hope. We have all realised something this week: we’ll really miss him when he’s gone.