As the SNP's war on motorists expands to Dundee, Edinburgh and Aberdeen… Will hated LEZs drive final nail into the coffin of our ghost town city centres?

The residents’ reviews of the three city centres already make bleak enough reading. Edinburgh is ‘a shadow of its former self’, a ‘shanty town and slum’ that surely leaves tourists ‘sorely disappointed’.

Aberdeen, once the bustling oil capital of Europe, is ‘a mess’, its heart ‘hollowed out’ and a ‘husk of its former self’.

Dundee – the coolest city in Scotland according to the Wall Street Journal just a few years ago – is becoming a ‘ghost town’ following a succession of store closures. Marks & Spencer, a fixture of the Murraygate for decades, is among the latest to announce its departure from the city centre. It will be gone within months.

The same is true of the St Nicholas Street branch of M&S in Aberdeen. It has been there for 80 years and is perhaps the best-known shop in the city. All Aberdeen’s department stores – John Lewis, Debenhams, House of Fraser – are already gone.

In the circumstances, many of the three cities’ residents feel their respective local authorities would be well advised to avoid making a bad situation worse.

And yet, they argue, that is exactly what the city fathers are about to do.

In two months, Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Dundee will follow Glasgow’s lead by introducing city centre low emission zones (LEZs), banning older cars from entering.

Those who flout the rules will be captured by cameras using number plate recognition technology and face fines of £60, which double to £120 for second offences and double again to £240 for a third infraction. The fines are capped at £480 for those who enter the LEZ in non-compliant cars four times or more, but the cap is £960 for larger vehicles.

For the local councils concerned, the LEZs are necessary contributions towards national climate targets, which include reducing car use by 20 per cent by 2030 and reaching net zero emissions by 2045.

Aberdeen City Council says its LEZ will create a ‘vibrant, accessible and safe city centre’.

Edinburgh’s transport and environment convener Scott Arthur says it will make the heart of the capital more ‘people friendly’.

Dundee says its LEZ will make the city a more ‘inclusive and desirable place to live’.

But all three claims are struggling for traction among armies of disaffected residents. Their talk is more of coffins and final nails.

Vigorous campaigns of resistance are under way in the three cities. There are threats from some of civil disobedience – even of sabotaging the technology used to capture non-compliant motorists.

And while the protests may look like lost causes just weeks ahead of the schemes going live, the campaigners believe it is their city centres which will be lost causes if they do not speak up now.

They point to the imposition of LEZs as evidence of the erosion of democracy and of an increasingly dictatorial attitude towards the public by elected representatives. Academics have noticed a similar pattern.

Dr Penny Lewis, a Dundee University expert on architecture and urban planning, points to a nationwide shift in the relationship between government and the people it serves.

Politicians, she says, have come to see themselves more as ‘managers’ than public servants – while the decision-making process even at local authority level is ‘ideology-driven’ and disconnected from both ordinary people and common sense. 

‘They never seem to be making decisions onb the basis of how we can make life better for ordinary people living in our council areas,’ says Dr Lewis.

‘If you meet these politicians, they are very high-handed and seem to think that when ordinary people express frustration it’s because they’re stupid or bigoted or don’t understand that the planet is going to burn. It’s like a generation of politicians who don’t really understand democracy, I would say, and how it’s supposed to work.’

Dr Lewis adds: ‘There’s been a kind of panic which has generated a situation in which local authorities who are failing on a whole number of counts in terms of the regeneration of their cities seem to think that this makes them look like they’re doing something, that they have a purpose and they are on the right side of history because they are acting to save the planet.’

The reality, suggests the lecturer who lives just outside Dundee, is they are exacerbating problems in city centres already struggling badly in the post-lockdown era.

For those who run businesses in Glasgow city centre the picture may seem familiar.

Its LEZ was introduced in June last year and by the end of February the council had issued more than 35,000 penalty notices for unwelcome vehicles.

In January, 127 fines of £960 each were handed out to drivers of minibuses, coaches and HGVs which had already entered the zone four times or more.

Farcically, some of the non-compliant vehicles were the council’s own. The local authority has spent more than £700,000 hiring compliant vehicles at taxpayers’ expense – yet dozens of tickets have been issued to council workers taking older bin lorries, vans and minibuses into the LEZ.

The drivers are being pursued for payment.

But there are elements of tragedy as well as farce in the Glasgow experience over the past ten months, says nightclub owner Donald MacLeod.

He tells the Mail that business owners in Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Dundee need only visit Glasgow to see the ‘destructive effects’ of LEZs.

‘Midweek, Glasgow is now a ghost town where in some places empty, boarded-up shop units outnumber those still in operation,’ he says. ‘The hospitality sector has also been ravaged, with pubs, restaurants and clubs closing at an alarming rate.’

For him, LEZ should stand for Low Economy Zone, ‘because that is what it ultimately creates’.

He says: ‘Since its introduction, footfall has fallen off a cliff, with many people – particularly those on lower incomes who can’t afford a new compliant car and where a regular bus or train service is not available – electing to shop and stay local where parking is free and there is no chance of them being hit with a disproportionate LEZ fine.’

Now, he says, this ‘discriminatory policy’ which serves as a council ‘cash cow’ is being wheeled out elsewhere.

By and large, diesel cars registered before 2015 and petrol vehicles 18 or more years old will not be allowed in the city centres. Owners are urged to check LEZ compliancy online before driving into the zones.

In Edinburgh, where the LEZ is enforced from June 1, the zone will cover the length of Princes Street, the Old Town, Canongate and parts of the West End and Southside. The Scottish parliament falls just inside the zone but the Palace of Holyroodhouse just outside.

It is Scott Dixon – an Edinburgh-based consumer champion known as the Complaints Resolver – who reviews his adopted home city as ‘a shanty town and a slum’.

He points to data from the Scottish Government’s own air monitoring sites which show that nitrogen dioxide levels – the key pollutant cited by councils bringing in LEZs – are already comfortably below the legal threshold in Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Dundee.

Indeed, at two checkpoints within the Edinburgh LEZ, the levels have been around half the legal limit for the past four years.

‘Wasting money on initiatives to resolve problems that don’t exist is frankly ludicrous,’ says Mr Dixon.

‘The money wasted on LEZ zones would be better spent on repairing potholes.’

He adds: ‘The ban on older vehicles entering the city centre is unnecessary. It’s buses that are the problem, with Princes Street being clogged with them, and they are LEZ compliant.

‘This is yet another initiative by a cash-strapped council that sees motorists as giant cash cows to rinse at every opportunity.’

Another of the Edinburgh protesters is Pam Peters, 66, a West End resident and local member of the #Together group which campaigns nationally against LEZs.

She asks: ‘Why now, when our city centres are decimated already? Why are we bringing in policies that are going to restrict the movement of people into our city centre?

‘From an economic perspective, it doesn’t make any sense.’

Ms Peters says she is ‘heart-broken’ by the decline in the city centre in the 20-plus years she has lived in Edinburgh.

‘It’s desperate, but they are plugging away with this ideology rather than actually looking around themselves and saying, “What do we need? What do we need right now?”’

In Aberdeen, newly retired Ian Cukrowski was the owner of coffee roasters MacBeans for decades and still owns the Little Belmont Street building that will fall within the LEZ, which is enforced from May 30.

He talks of heartbreak too. ‘It’s a mess,’ he says. ‘The speed of the decline has been far worse than I ever thought.’

The introduction of bus gates in the city centre earlier this year had already wreaked chaos for tradesmen and delivery drivers, he said, and the LEZ would make matters worse.

‘I still regularly talk to the council traffic wardens and they’re full of doom and gloom. They say: “If you think it’s quiet now, just wait until the LEZ kicks in.” The city centre has been fully hollowed out and is now nothing more than a husk of its former self.’

Mr Cukrowski adds: ‘I can understand why some large inland conurbations may benefit from a LEZ, but a city whose centre is perched on the North-East coast will now penalise cars deemed fit for the road by dint of having a valid MOT certificate... crazy.’

On a Facebook group dedicated to fighting the LEZ and the bus gates, many pledge to refuse payment of any fines. Others say that they will no longer go to the city centre because there is ‘nothing there anyway’.

One anonymous poster provides detailed information on the lamp-post-mounted camera technology and its vulnerability to tampering – and suggests readers can do with the information what they see fit.

In Dundee, where the LEZ signs painted on the roads have been in place so long they are already starting to wear off, the online chatter is of the city centre becoming a ‘dead loss’.

Here, the enforcement date is June 1 but, argue some, the place is a ‘ghost town’ already.

Why, asks one correspondent to his local paper, are essential local council services being cut while ‘vast sums’ are being thrown at ‘pointless environmental projects’ to solve a problem that is not even there?

What does seem clear from the three councils is they have taken heed of at least one embarrassing element of the Glasgow experience.

A Dundee City Council spokesman said only 12 per cent of its fleet would be non-compliant by June 1 and none would operate within the zone.

Aberdeen City Council said its fleet was almost entirely compliant and workers in vehicles which were not would be expected to switch into ones which were before entering the zone.

City of Edinburgh Council said that it had been replacing its non-compliant vehicles and the small number remaining by June 1 would not operate in or near the LEZ.

Labour councillor Scott Arthur said achieving the council’s net zero commitments would help ‘create a more sustainable, safe and people-friendly city’.

He said more than 95 per cent of petrol vehicles already complied with emission standards and Lothian Buses’ fleet was now 100 per cent compliant.

He added: ‘It is important to bust the myth that the LEZ is a “money making exercise”. The reality is that it will cost money

to operate even after fine income is included, and we aim to recover those costs from the Scottish Government.

‘This, alongside schemes to cut congestion and make it easier and safer for people to walk, wheel and use public transport, is about making it much more pleasant and enjoyable to spend time in our fantastic capital city.’

The countdown in all three cities is on. It remains to be seen in each whether LEZs make their centres more attractive and welcoming places… or, indeed, have the opposite effect.

j.brocklebank@dailymail.co.uk