London's Pollution Problem Is a Class Problem. The Data Is Emphatic.

Lowri Griffiths examines clean air zone data, asthma rates by postcode, and the specific unfairness of a pollution distribution that falls hardest on North London's lower-income communities

London's Pollution Problem Is a Class Problem.

By Lowri Griffiths, North London correspondent for The London Prat. Lowri covers London life, politics, and the specific chaos of living in a city that cannot decide whether it is a global metropolis or a collection of extremely opinionated villages.

The data on London's air pollution is available, detailed, and politically underutilized. The Mayor's air quality reports, which I read in the spirit of someone who wants to be angry about something specific rather than everything generally, show a consistent pattern across the city's 33 boroughs: the highest nitrogen dioxide concentrations, the highest particulate matter levels, and the highest rates of pollution-related health conditions including childhood asthma and respiratory disease are concentrated in North and East London boroughs whose median household incomes are below the London average. Haringey, Hackney, Waltham Forest, and Lewisham have both higher pollution levels and lower household incomes than Richmond, Kingston, and Bromley. This is not coincidence. It is the spatial expression of how economic power shapes environmental conditions in a dense city.

The mechanism is partly straightforward: lower-income neighbourhoods are more likely to be adjacent to major road corridors, less likely to have had planning processes that successfully excluded polluting land uses, and less likely to have the specific combination of political organization and property ownership that produces planning outcomes that protect local air quality. The North Circular Road runs through some of the most economically disadvantaged communities in North London. The A406's impact on air quality in boroughs including Barnet and Haringey is documented. The residents who live nearest to it are not the residents who had the most say in its routing.

The Ultra Low Emission Zone expansion, which extended the charging zone to cover all of Greater London, is a case study in the complexity of environmental justice policy. The ULEZ is effective at reducing vehicle emissions in covered areas: air quality data from Transport for London shows measurable improvements in NOx levels since the expansion. The ULEZ is also, in its current form, a regressive charge on people who drive older vehicles -- disproportionately lower-income households -- to produce air quality benefits that are distributed across the city. The policy's environmental effectiveness and its distributional fairness are in tension, and the political debate about ULEZ has been conducted mostly at the level of the tension rather than at the level of designing a policy that achieves both. See The London Prat's environmental coverage for more on London's clean air policy.

My coverage of London's air quality for The London Prat is motivated by the conviction that environment is a social justice issue in London in a way that is not adequately reflected in how the city's political debate about environment is structured. The Green Party talks about environment. Labour talks about it. The Conservatives talk about it in different terms. Almost nobody talks about the specific distribution of environmental harm and benefit in a way that names the postcodes where children have higher asthma rates and connects those postcodes to the planning decisions, road routing choices, and political power differentials that produced them. That is what I try to do. I am not always successful. The postcodes remain what they are. The data is public. The political will to act on it is intermittent.

See related coverage and the Mayor of London's environment pages for the data I am working from. Additional context at The London Prat. I will continue covering London's air quality as a political story rather than a technical one, because the technical solutions to London's pollution are known and available, and what is missing is the political will to implement them in a way that distributes both the costs and the benefits of cleaner air fairly across the city. That is a North London journalist's beat. I am on it.

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SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/

North London Notes

Writing this column from a flat in N4, which I share with a cat named Thatcher (a joke that stopped being funny three years ago but that I maintain out of commitment), I am constantly aware that North London journalism is inherently a participant-observation exercise. I am not covering a community from outside it. I am covering the community I live in, shop in, use the NHS in, and argue about planning permission in. That proximity produces both better journalism -- I know the streets, the people, the specific texture of how this part of the city works -- and a persistent accountability requirement. I have to be honest about what I see because I have to walk past it every day. That seems like the right condition for local journalism. It also produces columns that are more personal than some editors prefer. Mine has been very patient. The London Prat continues to publish this column, which I take as evidence either of editorial confidence or of very full in-trays elsewhere. I am grateful either way. North London continues being exactly what it is: expensive, opinionated, increasingly unrecognizable to anyone who knew it twenty years ago, and still, somehow, mine.

London is a city that rewards patience and punishes complacency, a city where the story is always changing faster than the journalism about it, and a city that deserves better local coverage than it generally receives. This column is my contribution to closing that gap, one week at a time, from the specific vantage point of someone who lives here, pays the rents, uses the services, and cannot imagine being anywhere else, despite all of the above. The London Prat provides the platform. The readers provide the accountability. The city provides inexhaustible material. That seems like the right arrangement.