This is the fifth time I’ve looked at vehicle registration data in UK to see the extent to which private car owners are impacted by the expansion of ULEZ. I’ll probably do it once more to retrospectively see what the situation was at the time of the general election, and the former Prime Minister vowing to reverse one of the most successful policy interventions of recent years.
That last post, looking at the data until the end of December 2023, showed the total numbers of ULEZ affected private cars in London were 305,009 down from 552,198 in March 2022. What has another three months done to those figures?
As always this analysis is caveated with three methodological notes:
- only privately owned cars (so not company cars and not goods vehicles, vans, etc)
- focusing on diesel and petrol
- assuming the cut-off years are 2005 for petrol and 2014 for diesel, even though I know this marks cars that are exempt, like our 2004 Ford Focus, as chargeable.
The DfT has published a new version of the Veh9901 dataset which means I can do an analysis of 2 full years from my baseline of March 2022. In the three months from December 2023 to March 2024 there has been a further fall of 1,600 private cars registered to London addresses. That running total is now a net loss of 60,355.
But the total of petrol and diesel private cars has fallen by over 16,000, ten times the total reduction, underlining the continued transfer of car ownership away from the internal combustion engine.
After consistently seeing the reduction in diesel outpace petrol this is the first quarter where the drop was greater among non-compliant petrols (from 8.5% to 8.1%) than it was diesels (4.2% to 3.9%).
| London (total), March 2024 (with change from March 2022) | Total | + / - | % | + / - |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Private cars | 2,396,313 | -60,355 | | |
| Petrol (registered up to 2005) | 194,982 | -85,436 | 8.1 | -3.3 |
| Petrol (registered from 2006) | 1,498,072 | +74,078 | 62.6 | +4.6 |
| Diesel (registered up to 2014) | 92,599 | -179,181 | 3.9 | -7.2 |
| Diesel (registered from 2015) | 298,176 | +24,974 | 12.4 | +1.3 |
| | | | | |
| ULEZ chargeable private cars | 287,581 | -247,189 | 12.0 | -10.5 |
Inner London saw a small fall in the number of private cars of 1,315 (taking the total decline in two years to 20,342). The proportion of private cars exempt from paying ULEZ is now up to 87.5% (up from 86.9% in December 2023). This means that out of the 626,846 private cars in Inner London, 78,141 of them were non-compliant in March 2024. 24 months previously, the figure was over 120,000.
| London (Inner), March 2024 (with change from March 2022) | Total | + / - | % | + / - |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Private cars | 626,846 | -20,342 | | |
| Petrol (registered up to 2005) | 54,585 | -22,523 | 8.7 | -3.2 |
| Petrol (registered from 2006) | 384,652 | -1,675 | 61.4 | +1.7 |
| Diesel (registered up to 2014) | 23,556 | -20,262 | 3.8 | -3.0 |
| Diesel (registered from 2015) | 75,924 | +2,950 | 12.1 | +0.8 |
| | | | | |
| ULEZ chargeable private cars | 78,141 | -42,785 | 12.5 | -6.2 |
In Outer London this most recent quarter reflects almost 9 months since ULEZ expansion came into effect.
As we saw last time, car ownership habits in the expanded ULEZ are outpacing Inner London. 88.2% of private cars registered to addresses in Outer London are exempt from paying ULEZ. Two years prior, in March 2022, 23.8% of private cars would have faced ULEZ charges but this most recent data shows that falling to 11.8% (it’s 12.5% in Inner London).
Out of 1,769,467 private cars in Outer London, 209,440 were paying the ULEZ charge up to the end of March 2024. In March 2022 that would have been 431,272. That’s gone from being almost 1 in 4 to getting closer to being 1 in 10.
| London (Outer), March 2024 (with change from March 2022) | Total | + / - | % | + / - |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Private cars | 1,769,467 | -40,013 | | |
| Petrol (registered up to 2005) | 140,397 | -62,913 | 7.9 | -3.3 |
| Petrol (registered from 2006) | 1,115,207 | +77,540 | 63.0 | +5.7 |
| Diesel (registered up to 2014) | 69,043 | -158,919 | 3.9 | -8.7 |
| Diesel (registered from 2015) | 222,252 | +22,019 | 12.6 | +1.5 |
| | | | | |
| ULEZ chargeable private cars | 209,440 | -221,832 | 12.0 | -11.8 |
The debate over ULEZ is all but settled. The facts are clear: in just two years, 48% of London’s most polluting vehicles have been removed from the streets
For the first time the total has dropped below 300,000 and while the pace of reduction has slowed during this quarter (the linear regression now predicts zero-ULEZ in February 2026 rather than December 2025), the downward trend is irresistible.
A wider discussion is about whether the success of ULEZ in London means it should be expanded elsewhere in the country. Several countries have Clean Air Zones of their own but do we need more? Well, in my last post I found that at the end of 2023 26.5% of private cars outside London would fall foul of ULEZ. The updated figures show that figure has reduced to 26%, representing 7.2 million cars (of which 5.6 million are diesels).
A great deal was made of ULEZ in the May Mayoral Election and the July General Election. The next quarter of data will take us through to the end of June and draw a line under just how many people were actually being affected by the ULEZ ‘debate’. It’s probably the last time I’ll blog about the data, at least until early 2026 and ChatGPT’s projection of zero-ULEZ.