The air pollution monitoring site at Putney High Street went over the annual pollution allowance for NO2 on the evening of 3rd January. The limits for NO2 came into legal force in 2010. The Government has said it will be unlikely to reduce pollution sufficiently to meet the European limits until around 2025.
The Mayor of London recently joined with 12 regions in seven countries which have the most concentrated industrial operations, to ask the EU executive to "recognise their efforts to control emissions when considering enforcement action″, by taking account of their "special features" – i.e., their higher concentration of sources of pollution. Although they deny asking for pollution limits to be raised.
In February 2011, the Mayor said on LBC that
"… what’s happened is that successive governments have signed up happily to various EU air quality standards which are very good and very desirable, but what they {UK Government] haven’t done is done what other European governments have done and negotiated with Brussels special exemptions for their urban areas. [We] need to be going to Brussels and saying, ‘Why are you exempting Turin? Why are you exempting Paris from this when you are not exempting London?’ I think it’s been a gross failure of negotiation."
Darren Johnson said:
"The Mayor seems more focused upon changing the rules, rather than solving the problem. We have had over a decade to reduce pollution to below the European limits, but have failed to do so. In fact, under this Mayor we have had a lethal mix of backward steps and deliberate delays which have made air pollution worse than it should have been and had a direct impact on Londoners’ health.
"London urgently needs a very low emission zone in central London to deal with the main air pollution problem ahead of the 2012 Olympic games. Last year was one of the worse years for air pollution since the big spike in 2003 and we can’t afford a re-run in 2012."
