Sheffield Clean Air Zone: Ex-council leader has "severe questions" over scheme

Paul Scriven, Liberal Democrat politician and former Leader of Sheffield City Council, has expressed his reservations about the Sheffield Clean Air Zone, questioning why it was the council’s first port of call to improve air quality.

He said: “Like most people I instinctively want to see our air cleaner and for Sheffielders to be able to breathe cleaner air but to do that you need to have an approach that will work and take people with you and I have some severe questions and reservations about the scheme in its present form.”

Sheffield’s Clean Air Zone will go-live from Monday, February 27. This is a class C chargeable zone for the most polluting heavy goods vehicles (HGVs), light goods vehicles, (LGVs), vans, buses, coaches and taxis that drive within the inner ring road and the city centre.

Private cars and motorbikes will not be charged.

Mr Scriven says his first question is “who on earth agreed to the outer ring road being involved? Ring roads are to stop traffic going into and above the city centre and into other major roads around the city. Having the ring road included will displace traffic, wagons and other large vehicles into estates and other arterial routes with lots of housing and shopping areas in the city so it will make it worse for those areas.

“The second question I would ask is why the implementation of this seems absolutely farcical? We hear that only on Thursday of last week there was a licensing committee to deal with some of the issues that taxi drivers have been raising for a number of years. This scheme was agreed locally in a business plan back in December 2018, what on earth have senior councillors and officers been doing for the last five years that a few days before a scheme comes into place they’re still sorting out policy issues.

“Businesses work on certainty, they have to plan ahead,” he continued. “This will be bad for business.”

He added: “The third question I would raise is where are the carrots, rather than it all being about sticks? When I ran the council, one of the issues we looked at, looking internationally, was going to Malmo in Sweden. We looked at what they were doing there.

“They were looking at ways of incentivising taxi drivers to use a form of electric vehicle and giving them priority to jump to the front of taxi queues to pick up people to increase their revenue. I would want to see more carrots before the big stick gets taken out.”

The phrase ‘carrot and stick’ is a metaphor for the use of a combination of reward and punishment to induce a desired behaviour.

“I have real reservations about the impact this will have on human health by displacing traffic on the outer ring road, I have real worries about the effect this will have on businesses and I’m hoping the council have thought it through because if businesses have to be charged this, prices goods and services will rise in the city centre which will affect every Sheffielder whether they drive or not,” Mr Scriven said.

He concluded: “It’s no good for the council to say this has been imposed on them by the government. Sheffield labour and green councillors took this decision back in December 2018 so they should have thought through some of the implications that I’m now spelling out. I feel sorry for businesses that are going to be affected by this and I feel sorry for some suburbs of Sheffield who will see higher levels of traffic because the ring road is in the scheme.”