During the summer the Association of London Government, along with TfL, produced an advertisement to publicise its vehicle emissions testing initiative. The ad showed a drawing of a group of vehicles with cigarettes instead of exhaust pipes accompanied by the slogan "Smoking Kills".
It claimed: "24,000 people in the UK die every year due to breathing in polluted air", then mentioning emissions testing as if it were a solution to the supposed problem. The ad clearly implied that vehicle pollution kills 24,000 people per year.
The claim originates in a misreading of a report by the Government Committee on the Medical Effects of Air Pollution (COMEAP) some years ago.
However, the pollutants implicated in the report were mainly industrial - what transport content there is emanates mainly from the elderly diesel engines of buses and HGV's. Naturally the report pointed out that correlation did not imply causation; it could be that social or meteorological factors that cause some days to have higher pollutant levels than others also cause stress to the terminally ill. The conclusion was that there was no proof that pollution caused any premature deaths at all, but that it might, in a worst case, cause up to 24,000 terminally ill people per year to die up to two weeks prematurely.
Very different from the "24,000 people a year struck down in their prime by car fumes" claimed by the green lobby!
Anyone glimpsing the ad might simply assume that it was a public information poster warning of the dangers of car pollution. In other words, Ken Livingstone was using taxpayers' money to produce misleading propaganda for his anti-car crusade.
I reported this to the ASA, and it upheld my complaint. They have agreed that the advert misleadingly implied that 24,000 a year die from vehicle pollution. They also agreed that the statement "24,000 a year die from air pollution" could not be backed up and told the advertiser not to repeat it. The Ass'n of London Government tried to use the COMEAP report to support their claim, but the ASA were quite clear that it didn't say what they claimed it said.
Andrew Bent, writing in 'On the Road'.
Guilty on all counts, M'Lud.
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