CAZ plan will only comply by ‘rounding down numbers’ claim
THE new clean air zone plan for Greater Manchester will only comply with the law by ‘rounding down the numbers’.
That’s according to campaign group Let Manchester Breathe, which says the new CAZ will only bring pollution in the air below legal limits ‘by a hair’s breadth’. Its concerns were echoed by several councillors at a meeting of the city-region’s clean air committee on Wednesday.
During that meeting, councillors formally approved sending the new ‘investment-led’ CAZ to the government to get a final thumbs up.
Unveiled last week by mayor Andy Burnham and clean air lead Eamonn O’brien, the new plan will not charge motorists for driving anywhere in Greater Manchester.
Instead, the new approach will see buses replaced by zero-emissions vehicles, at a cost of £51 million, and a further £30 million will be allocated for a ‘clean taxi fund’, so cabbies can upgrade their cars to cleaner or electric models. Additionally, a further £5 million will be spent on improving traffic flow at two key locations in the city.
They are the A57 Regent Road in Salford, where the speed limit will be dropped from 40mph to 30mph and traffic light timings will be altered, and Quay Street in Manchester, where congestion reduction measures will be introduced. That will lead to more effective compliance with the law quicker than a ‘benchmark’ city-centre CAZ, leaders insisted last week.
But data in a report from the Mayor’s office shows that, even after the trio of schemes are finished, Regent Road’s air quality will still be over the legal limit – as will Rochdale Road, in Manchester. Both the A57 and A664 will have concentrations of 40.3 micrograms of nitrogen dioxide per cubic metre.
The legal limit is 40, with the World Health Organisation’s recommended guideline 10. Campaigners say city leaders are able to say that
the new plan gets underneath the legal limit – which they were instructed to do by 2026 – by rounding down the
40.3 figure to 40.
However, the Observer understands that leaders are confident the scheme will work because current government guidance is that any reading below
40.4 should be rounded down.
“The results suggested by the modelling are only a hair’s breadth below the legal target,” a spokesperson for Let Manchester Breathe added. “Furthermore, whilst the full details of the models have not been released, the report submitted to the committee highlights that, under the new plan, 65 sites will remain at more than three and a half times the limit recommended by the World Health Organization guidelines.”
These concerns were repeated by councillors at the committee, with Labour Coun Tom Besford, who represents Rochdale on the panel, saying: “76 sites in 2025 are between 35-40.
“To what extent are we putting ourselves at risk that we could find ourselves back here again where we are needing to go under the requirement?”
And Mark Roberts from Stockport, the only Lib Dem on the committee, added: “It’s important to acknowledge it does not give us clean air, it gives us cleaner air.”
In response to these concerns, Nigel Bellamy, Transport for Greater Manchester’s (TFGM) lead on air quality modelling, said: “In terms of uncertainty, the [benchmark] clean air zone has more uncertainty. A CAZ means you are predicting the behaviour across quite a large fleet [of vehicles].
“Buses and taxis are vehicles in our control... so we have a greater level of confidence for those vehicles. The other thing is monitoring the assumptions through tracking those assumptions, and they appear to be robust. The ANPR data is really beneficial for that.”
Committee vice-chair Tracey Rawlins, from Manchester and standing in for Eamonn O’brien, added: “We are almost at the starting point.
“This is only one tool in the box to get the cleanest air possible.
“It keeps going.”
The new clean air zone plan was approved unanimously by the committee.
In response to the claim that the CAZ only achieves compliance via rounding, a Clean Air Greater Manchester spokesperson said: “Cleaning up the air people breathe is a priority for Greater Manchester, and we have set out a Clean Air Plan that will enable us to do that more quickly and fairly following the impact of the pandemic.
“We support the transition to a cleaner, carbon neutral city-region via an investment-led, noncharging plan, that achieves legal compliance while not risking financial hardship to residents or businesses.
“We have already started to improve air quality through investment in the Bee Network, which saw the first buses brought back under local control in September and 50 new electric buses running on Greater Manchester’s roads.
“This is the first step in our long-term ambition to deliver a fully emissionfree bus fleet by 2032.
“There is a compelling case for what Greater Manchester has set out and it is now for Government to determine which scenario the city-region is to implement – an investment-led, non-charging plan, or a charging regional centre Clean Air Zone.”