Smoking blitz in London
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• Central London residents are to be urged to report smoking trucks.
Westminster City Council plans to launch a scheme called Exhaust Watch: it will send report cards to 60,000 residents with a request that they fill in details of offending vehicles. These complaints will then be passed on to police and the Vehicle Inspectorate.
Exhaust Watch is similar to campaigns operating in Derby and Kirklees, West Yorkshire. Westminster Council has been receiving an average of 50 complaints a month about smoking trucks.
Without such a scheme the council says it cannot take any action against hauliers because it has no formal arrangements with the police. It simply tells residents to contact the police themselves.
Exhaust Watch is based on Coach Check, which Westminster introduced last October, ask ing residents to report coach drivers parking in awkward places or using inappropriate roads (CM 4-10 Oct 1990).
So far it has received about 1,000 complaints, but has only passed 200 of them on to the Bus & Coach Council, which will decide whether to take the issue up with the operator.
"Although police have the power to ban vehicles which emit black smoke, it's usually way down their list of priorities," says Donna Clarke, the council's environment policy analyst.
The council is taking diesel emissions more seriously as the number of CVs travelling through London increases.
Apart from damaging the atmosphere, black smoke from diesel soils buildings, which is an expensive problem for Westminster Council which has many historic buildings to keep clean. Vehicles cause 34% of black smoke, and 92% of those emissions come from diesels, says Clarke.
0 The Vehicle Inspectorate announced in April that it wanted more members of the public to report smoking CVs.