Site icon Inside Croydon

Perry has no plan to improve our borough’s toxic air pollution

insidecroydon

Deadly toxic: Croydon’s heavy traffic makes the borough’s air quality one of the most polluted in all of London

CROYDON COMMENTARY: The borough’s Conservative Mayor, Jason Perry, is failing to protect the health of Croydon residents, says Councillor RIA PATEL (pictured left)

We all know that Mayor Jason Perry has been very vocal about opposing ULEZ, the Ultra-Low Emission Zone, so I assumed he must have a better plan to reduce air pollution.

Yet in response to my question at a recent council meeting, he admitted that he doesn’t even have one. This failure puts all our health at risk.

Let’s be clear, air pollution is a killer. A recent study by Imperial College estimated that nearly 200 people die every year in Croydon due to air pollution, and thousands of years of life are lost across our borough. Croydon has one of the highest death rates from pollution in London.

Pollution doesn’t just affect people at the end of their lives.

Children inhale more air per unit of bodyweight than adults and they are more active and therefore breathe in more air pollution.

Perry perils: the decision of the Mayor to do nothing to improve air quality may damage Croydon’s children permanently

The World Health Organization warns that children’s bodies are less able to deal with the toxicants contained in air pollution, and this pollution not only affects them physically but the neurotoxic compounds in air pollution can also affect children’s brain development.

Even before they are born, babies of exposed to air pollution during pregnancy are more likely to be premature and low birth weight.

We have known about this problem for a long time and Croydon Council used to have a clean air action plan. The last time it was revised was 2017.

That plan wasn’t great but it was at least an attempt to start tackling the problem.

When it comes to reducing pollution, Mayor Perry has made it clear that he is completely against the ULEZ. As my Green Party colleague Peter Underwood has said, we know the ULEZ isn’t perfect but it is a move in the right direction.

Given that Mayor Perry is opposing a plan to reduce toxic pollution, I was appalled to find that he doesn’t even have a plan of his own. In fact, he appears to have done absolutely nothing to come up with a new air quality plan since he was elected. Even worse, he admitted that he has just left the old air quality action plan on a shelf gathering dust.

Death toll: figures from 2021 showed Croydon had the highest number of deaths of all boroughs in London related to toxic polluted air

This dereliction of duty is really shocking. The Mayor is failing to protect our health and the health of our children.

In his answer at Town Hall questions, the Mayor mumbled something about “modal shift”. That’s the idea that we need to change how people travel around to methods that produce less pollution. But, as Inside Croydon has often reported, Mayor Perry’s track record on transport points in the opposite direction.

That why we all need to keep fighting to get the Mayor to cut pollution and make our streets healthier. If he wants to develop a genuine plan to reduce air pollution in Croydon significantly, then the Greens will work with him to make that happen.

But he needs to act quickly. Croydon residents are suffering and dying every day and we can’t afford to wait any longer.

Croydon Commentary provides a platform for any of our readers to offer their personal views about what matters to them in and around the borough. To submit an article for publication, just email us at inside.croydon@btinternet.com, or post your comment to an Inside Croydon article that has caught your attention

 


Exit mobile version