Mayor blames Europe for bad air days: Dirt clouds from Continent 'led to breaches of pollution targets'

12 April 2012

Boris Johnson blames clouds of pollution blowing in from Europe for London breaching its air quality targets.

The Mayor claimed that 75 per cent of the breaches so far this year were a direct result of dirt from power stations and agriculture on the Continent.

He insisted he was taking measures to tackle local traffic emissions, which are the underlying cause of poor air quality in the capital. These included bringing in hybrid buses and electric vehicles, tackling vehicle idling and imposing age limits for taxis.

Monitoring equipment in the Marylebone Road has recorded 20 "bad air days" since January. Each site is allowed just 35 days in which it exceeds European limits for so-called PM10s.

However, critics claimed Mr Johnson had taken "backward steps" which led to poor air quality claiming thousands of lives every year and put the capital at risk of £300 million of EU fines from Brussels. They suggested he was using European pollution as an excuse for his failure to ban all but the cleanest vehicles from central London.

The Green Party's Darren Johnson said: "Boris appears to be saying that this ill wind is gathering up all the pollution from Paris and dumping it directly on Marylebone Road, while by-passing areas like Bromley, Havering and Harrow which are all under the European pollution limits."

But Mr Johnson told the London Assembly: "London's air quality has been improving but there is a long way to go. In the last few weeks there have been particular concerns and air quality problems caused not just by London generated emissions. I'm afraid to say 75 per cent of the PM10 exceedances in these hotspots occurred during big European pollution episodes."

His environment adviser Isabel Dedring said: "The background level [of pollution] is mostly from traffic and that's something we're addressing with a range of measures.

"But what do we do about pollution from Europe? Legally the European Commission does not take into account where air pollution is coming from."

Brussels last month granted the UK more time to meet air pollution targets.

Create a FREE account to continue reading

eros

Registration is a free and easy way to support our journalism.

Join our community where you can: comment on stories; sign up to newsletters; enter competitions and access content on our app.

Your email address

Must be at least 6 characters, include an upper and lower case character and a number

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account

* Required fields

Already have an account? SIGN IN

By clicking Create Account you confirm that your data has been entered correctly and you have read and agree to our Terms of use , Cookie policy and Privacy policy .

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in