The Department for Transport has quietly been writing to local authorities in recent months to tell them it has paused funding for retrofitting as a result of ‘poor performance’ SteveRobson04 reports
Local councils have spent at least £45m since 2016 retroffitting older, diesel buses with Selective Catalytic Reduction exhausts which were supposed to reduce the amount of nitrous oxides they emit.
A study in three cities including Manchester found pollution has increased despite buses being retrofitted with special exhausts as part of a flagship £5 billion policy to boost “easier and more affordable” travel across Britain. It is not yet clear how many buses are affected, or how much money has been spent on retrofitting them – but in 2016 the Government said it had already spent around £20m on upgrading more than 2,000 buses. And a further £25m to retrofit buses in 14 local authorities was announced in 2019.
“The monitoring indicated the retrofitted buses were not reducing emissions as expected, with significant variation in performance between bus models with different retrofit technologies,” the report said. “We do not recommend any further retrofit purchases are made until this research has been completed,” the letter says.
Mark Roberts, a Lib Dem councillor in Stockport, told the committee it was “incredibly frustrating that the Government has dropped this bombshell about buses on us as they have.”
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