Last week I explained why there is a concerted and country-wide attack on the car which has been slowly building for a number of years. It is, I argued, linked to the government’s plans for Net Zero, but local councils have seized on the excuse of “clean air” to push it through.

The overwhelming growth of anti-car measures (LTNs, ULEZ, ZEZs and CAZs), however, betrays an entrenched hatred of the car and of ordinary people’s use of them. There is also an unasked-for and undemocratic widening of the original remit which is being pushed through by increasingly authoritarian local government.

Mike Hakata – (Cllr Hermitage & Gardens ward, Deputy Leader Haringey Council, Climate Action, Environment & Transport) betrays some of this in a series of tweets on 12 December 2022.

https://twitter.com/mikehakata/status/1601309099798716416

LTNs are behaviour-change programmes designed to reduce the number of unnecessary journeys. We need to do this because the growing decades-long issue of congestion is killing people now and killing the planet. Habits don’t change overnight and almost always need a serious nudge

The unfortunate reality is that in the initial months the pain will be felt equally on some or all of the main roads at certain times. The long-term gains, though, are fewer cars, less congested & safer roads, cleaner air and more attractive and inviting places to live and visit.

In the end we need to decide whether we are prepared to work together for greener, cleaner, safer and more active boroughs. Are we prepared to tackle the clear and present danger Climate Change poses for all of us?

So, it’s NOT about air pollution. And it certainly isn’t about public health because the air pollution argument is deeply flawed. The mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, knows it, Andy Burnham knows it, and so do authorities across the UK.

The overwhelming factor in public health is income. Longevity is far greater in wealthy but supposedly polluted London than it is in many parts of the UK with air like wine. Destroying the economy of cities like Manchester and London and surrounding areas will harm people, impoverish them, worsen their lives and improve their health not a jot.

This interview with Professor Tony Frew, who was professor of allergy and respiratory medicine at the Royal Sussex County Hospital, aired on the Radio Four, Today Programme some years ago. It was, of course, this being the BBC, not one chosen for immortalisation on iPlayer.

The same interview was conducted with Tony Frew by Julia Hartley-Brewer on Talk Radio. It was there for several years but now seems to have disappeared. Fortunately, I have a recording…

(I have resisted the temptation to emphasise all the mays, mights and probablys. I have transcribed the conversation verbatim, only removing various ems, ums and stalls.)

Julia Hartley-Brewer: Professor Tony Frew is on the line. He is professor of respiratory medicine at the University of Brighton and has been a government advisor on this issue. Tony, thank you so much for joining us. Good morning.

Tony Frew: Good morning.

Julia Hartley-Brewer: Let’s, Janet and John this, if you will. Keep it nice and simple for those of us of a smaller medical and technical brain. So, are 40,000 people dying prematurely because of pollution in this country?

Tony Frew: Well, the simple answer to that is, no, that’s not true. We know where the figure comes from, which is that there is a very small impact on everybody from the air pollution that we breath. This has been known about for 25 or more years, and it’s been quite difficult to know how to tell the general public about the problem. So, there’s a government committee on the medical effects of air pollution and they thought about this quite a lot and published, back in 2010, a paper that said we know how roughly how much impact this had in the year 2008. And they worked out there was probably a total of 340,000 “life years” that were lost. Now, that’s a bit of a life insurance sort of figure and not the sort of thing that most of us deal with.

Julia Hartley-Brewer: But that’s not 340,000 people dying?

Tony Frew: No, no. It’s not. They reckon that possibly that was the total figure for the whole of the UK relation to particles. To put that in context, that means that three days off everybody’s life. And it sounds like a lot of “life years” but it’s because the population is so large what it meant is the pollution that happened in 2008 may have meant that you die three days earlier, eventually. That’s everybody, assuming that the risk applies for everybody. This didn’t sound very exciting. So, they’ve sat down and they said, well, if we totted up all those three days and put them together, how many lives would it represent? And they came up with this figure of 29,000 “equivalent lives” that were lost. So, it’s not real people that died with the death certificate listed air pollution. It’s trying to put that 340,000 into numbers of people…

Julia Hartley-Brewer: If you added all those three days up into your average, you know, of 75 to 80 years alive, that’s how many would add up to.

Tony Frew: In crude terms, that’s how they did it. The maths of it is quite complicated.

Julia Hartley-Brewer: And the 29,000 figure is quite different to the 40,000 figure that’s mostly bandied about now, why is that?

Tony Frew: Well, the reason for that is that is there’s another pollutant called nitrogen oxides which are produced by burning fossil fuels … in fact burning. And we have been doing really well in reducing particles, but we’re not doing quite so well in reducing nitrogen oxides. And people have wondered whether notion oxides might also have an impact on death rates. Now the problem is that the things that produce nitrogen oxides also produce particles. So, in the maths it is quite difficult to separate those two things out, and the group that came together with the Royal College of Physicians report last year, they took a guess and said that there was a 30% overlap between the two pollutants and said if you did that it would come to about 40,000 people. Not, 40,000 people but 40,000 equivalent life years lost. And that’s where the 40,000 figure comes from and also where the 9000 that Sadiq Khan’s referring to in relation to London. But those are out of the adding of the nitrogen oxides to the particles.

Julia Hartley-Brewer: Just to clarify. I’ve heard different politicians use different figures and often they are using it in a shorthand form but mostly they are using it incorrectly. 40,000 people do not die every year. 40,000 lives are not lost. It is 40,000 “equivalent lives” and that is effectively, if you look it up, it’s basically three days off everyone’s lives.

Tony Frew: Yes, that’s for one year. So, if you, if you lived in London all your life, where there are slightly higher levels of pollution, and this was true, and you and you could get rid of all the pollution, which you can’t, you might be talking about six to nine months reduction in life expectancy from the current levels of pollution.

Julia Hartley-Brewer: So when you say get rid of pollution, you mean getting rid of the nasty diesel cars in the big lorries and buses?

Tony Frew: Well, if you look at where the pollution comes from, the first thing to say is that the average level of particles in London is 14 micro grammes per metre cubed. Let’s not worry about the actual units but 14 units. Of that 7 is probably irrelevant because that’s the background level across the world as a whole,

Julia Hartley-Brewer: So, that’s if you’re in the Amazon rainforest, it would be that.

Tony Frew: Yes, you would be getting that and in terms of how much the traffic contributes, It contributes two of those 14. So, if you got rid of all the traffic in London, that is, you banned, all cars, all trains, all motorcycles, everything except for walking, you could possibly get rid of two micrograms metre cubed. So, roughly one seventh of the pollution. So, when people are talking about we’re just going to try tinkering with the price of driving a diesel car in London, the impact on people’s health is going to be pretty small, because you’re not going to make a lot of difference to the particle levels. So, […] it’s important that people understand. Pollution isn’t good for you. It’s obviously bad for you. Buts it’s not THAT bad for you.

Julia Hartley-Brewer: Now hold on a minute. Sadiq Khan has been talking about the air in London is toxic. So, presumably the pollution across the UK and particularly in our major cities like London is going up.

Tony Frew: No. I went to school in South London and I used to play football around the corner from the Houses of Parliament. The levels of pollution then were at least four times greater than they are now. So, what’s been happening year on year is there’s been a decline in the amount of pollution. So, what’s changed is that we’ve changed the targets. We moved the goal posts in sense of saying we now want the pollution levels to be even lower than they are now. And we signed up to UN agreement that we would reduce our pollution to a certain fraction of what it was before.

And when people talk about things being illegal and things, you know, not reaching targets, they are aiming for a target in 2020, which we probably will meet in every city except London and Cardiff, Southampton and Derby and those cities are being challenged to say how can they reduce their emissions further to get down to the targets that have been set, but I mean . It’s not as toxic now as it used to be. It’s illegal because we made it illegal.

Julia Hartley-Brewer: We changed the target, basically?

Tony Frew: We changed the target, and then so when people say that the level of pollution is illegal, it is illegal because we said, “that’s illegal” not because it’s dangerous.

Julia Hartley-Brewer: But we hear about more children being admitted to hospital with more asthma. I live in fairly central London, but a nice leafy street. I’m not living on a main road in central London. There are lots of children going to school and there is an old people’s home. But surely that has an effect on real people in their real daily, daily lives.

Tony Frew: Absolutely. I mean, for pollution isn’t good for you. The sort of pollution we’re talking about does affect people who have asthma. It affects people who have chronic bronchitis and COPD and the sort of chronic chest conditions people get when they smoke. So, if you’ve got those then it is true that the levels of pollution you get in London are a problem when they peak. And during the winter when you get temperature inversions and usually clear cold days the air doesn’t move very much and the pollution builds up in the Thames Valley. So, that’s the sort of conditions when people with asthma and people with COPD will be affected. But they’re not dying from it. Their chests will get worse than they may get admitted to hospital if they really bad slightly more frequently than they would otherwise. So, it is important that we do something about pollution, but we have to keep it in proportion and concentrating on deaths and quoting that figure of 9,000 for London or 40,000 for the UK, which is wrong, it doesn’t help because it actually undermines public trust in in the scientists and in the politician.

Julia Hartley-Brewer: A lot of people feel that there has been a real attack on motorists and absolutely we need cleaner cars. I’m all for that, all for cutting pollution. But you said we told this is the big panacea. You said earlier that if we got rid of all traffic: trains, as well as cars and lorries, buses, everything it would reduce our pollution by seven. That would have, you said, a very small impact on people’s health. How much longer on average would we each individually live if we didn’t have any transport at all on our roads other than walking and bicycles?

Tony Frew: Depending on where you live, between 20 and 40 days. For most of us who if you don’t have chronic respiratory conditions your average man’s going to live to early 80s, the average women to her mid-80s, and you’re going to die about a month later than you would otherwise do it. And you know you won’t notice it, because you’re not going to say, “I didn’t die today because I’m not driving a car.” So, in politics you need to have some benefit. If you’re going to put things on people and ask them to pay more taxes or pay more to buy a certain sort of car or to drive a certain sort of car in London you’re going to need to think through when are you going to see the benefits. And it will take a very long time for any benefit to be apparent and the actual benefit really is quite small to most of us. If it might help some people with asthma or COPD, and we should be kind to them, but I think, you know, the idea that it’s going to miraculously change the life expectancy of the population is wrong.

Julia Hartley-Brewer: Can ask you how we could cut those 40,000 lives equivalent completely? You talked about not having any traffic at all, all the cars off the road. If we were to say we do not want a single person, even a minute of their lives to be cut, let alone a day, let alone months or years to be cut off their lives as a result of any pollution in this country. We want to save those 40,000 equivalent lives. What would we have to have to do?

Tony Frew: You would have to have completely renewable power so that all your heating and lighting came from things like wind power. You would have to have no power stations, no building sites, no traffic. Its not going to happen. It would just be such a different lifestyle that you probably wouldn’t be able to live in the UK, it would be too cold. So, you know, I think we will have to have a sort of common sense here, which is that we live longer lives now than we ever used to do. We live happier lives as a result of things that cause pollution, and we drive our cars because they’re convenient. If you can get better public transport, I’d be happy to use it. But at the moment, there are lots of things I need my car for, and I’m sure everybody else would say the same.

Julia Hartley-Brewer: So not just cars, ambulances, lorries delivering fresh food.

Tony Frew: There’s a whole bunch of things which we take for granted. We rely on motorised transport. In the long term, of course, we’re moving to electric buses. [But there] what we’re doing is we’re displacing the pollution. So, we make the pollution in a power station and then we use the energy another day so that in the Cromwell Road you won’t have so many people generating pollution. But the pollution will be generated somewhere else to provide the power to make the electrical car work.

Julia Hartley-Brewer: …and create the battery… and ship it overseas.

You said earlier, this erodes public trust, not just in politicians but in science. Would you like politicians, including the likes of Sadiq Khan, and it’s not just on the Labour side, it’s across the board of all political parties, would you like them to stop using these incorrect figures and that when they say 40,000 lives are lost as a result of pollution they should be [told] that that is a fact that is probably false?

Tony Frew: I should stress I used to be on the committee [that put this together]. I wasn’t on it at the time that it did this work. They are sensible people. They understand the science very well. And when they wrote that report they said there is a risk that by using this figure to make it easier for people to understand, that this will acquire a life of its own and will be incorrectly quoted. And that is exactly what’s happened, which is, that it’s an easy figure to latch onto. Much easier to understand than the life insurance aspects of what is happening. It is what my brother calls a “zombie statistic”. However many times you try and kill it, it comes back, and it’s simply not true. And I think there is a danger that you get in to arguing about the truth of statistics and not into how can we make our cars cleaner? How can we deal with the small number of really dirty cars that should be taken off the roads, which is about MOTS and about emissions and saying that if you are going to charge people for driving car it should be related to the emissions of the cars, as opposed to the fact that it is the car.

Julia Hartley-Brewer: Professor Tony Frew, what an absolute pleasure to speak to you. I think we’ll get that on audio and we’ll put it online. I think we would also send it to Sadiq Khan and his advisers to make sure they and other politicians understand that what the reality is on these figures.