If you hover over the ULEZ map you can see there are currently 19 locations where the new ULEZ cameras are located in Romford and surrounding areas and by the time you arrive in our office you will probably have been snapped by at least half of them! We run a car share scheme in the office and except for one of our contractors, everyone lives locally so the impact of the new scheme has to date had a limited impact. Apparently, TFL says 9 out of 10 cars currently spotted in London are ULEZ compliant now anyway.

But that isn’t the case for many of our clients, especially those who are running large construction sites, many of the trades are still running older vans and upgrading to become ULEZ compliant when electrification for vans is also around the corner, brings huge additional financial pressures for most independent tradespeople.

So where is the additional £300 million (net surplus of £200m) expected to have been generated this year going to be spent? There are very few specifics about how the money will be coming back into our community, all the rhetoric is about cleaner air for us Londoners and better transport networks, but when you consider it likely to have cost £50m to just add on these new cameras to the expanded network, that £200m isn’t looking like much of it is going to improve the transport networks in Romford.

I haven’t bothered to check the cameras on the way into work, but in a report in Essex Live recently it said there had been 795 total incidents against cameras of which 200 had already been stolen in the last 6 months. We are supposed to be one of the most watched countries in the world, with between 4-6m CCTV cameras in the UK around 16-24 cameras per square kilometre, that goes up when you get into London and in Barking and Dagenham, there has been an increase of 533% of cameras in the last 10 years.

When you read the stats, almost a third of the income generated from the new ULEZ zones comes from penalty notices, so it is worth checking before you come to visit us and get yourself covered.