Some 100,000 owners of older cars are to be hit by an £8-a-day charge in Birmingham in a bid to cut air pollution.
The Clean Air Zone (CAZ), which comes into force today, will affect around a quarter of all cars on the city s roads.
However, the AA has warned that the council-backed levy has good intentions but bad flaws and will disproportionately affect lower-income and younger drivers.
Highly polluting coaches, buses and HGVs will also face a £50 charge for entering the zone, which covers all roads within the A4540 Middleway ring road. It comes three months after Bath launched a similar charge – which so far has not applied to cars.
Birmingham Clean Air Zone LIVE Updates as vehicle charges begin - latest news and reaction in city
Owners of non-compliant cars must now pay to drive through the city centre in a bid to improve air quality
The video will auto-play soon8Cancel
Play now
Birmingham s clean air zone is now in place - meaning owners of non-compliant cars must pay to drive through the city centre.
The zone applies everywhere inside the A4540 Middleway Ring Road but not on the ring road itself. To give a better grasp of the affected areas and some of the key locations and attractions within the zone, we put together this map.
The student life has fallen far short of expectation over the last year
In the first of a three-part series on how the pandemic has affected university life, Helen Chandler-Wilde explores how the current cohort of university students have suffered
They were so desperate that they pinned pleas for help in the windows: “SOS”, read one; “Send food”, read another. All 500 students in Parker House, Dundee, were confined to their tiny bedrooms for two weeks after an outbreak of Covid-19 in the halls of residence last September.
It was a particularly severe lockdown. The safety-proofed windows only opened a crack, so fresh air was at a premium. The laundry room was shut down, so students spent two weeks in dirty clothes. If they wanted to use their kitchen, they had to book a slot on a rota so they did not cross paths with their flatmates.
Birmingham student who joined Syria terror group to be freed early from jail birminghammail.co.uk - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from birminghammail.co.uk Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
A parole board has ruled Yusuf Sarwar, 29, of Birmingham, will be released next month after serving eight years of a 12-year sentence. In 2013 he travelled to Syria to join a terror group.