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To mark Food Waste Action Week (March 17-23), Aldi is calling on children in Greater London to design a poster that encourages people to reduce food waste.

Britain’s fourth-largest supermarket is inviting children to submit their creative designs for the chance to win a £250 Aldi voucher for their family.

The entries will be judged by a panel of Aldi’s sustainability experts, with the winning designs proudly displayed at Aldi’s UK Headquarters to inspire colleagues to cut down their food waste.

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The competition is part of Aldi’s ongoing efforts to tackle food waste and support sustainable shopping habits, which has seen the supermarket recently reach the milestone of selling one million of its Surprise Bags through its partnership with Too Good To Go.

It also forms part of the supermarket’s Get Set to Eat Fresh programme, run in partnership with Team GB and ParalympicsGB, that aims to inspire young people to eat healthily.

Luke Emery, National Sustainability Director at Aldi, said: “At Aldi, we’re committed to reducing food waste and this competition is a great opportunity to show children how important of an issue food waste is.

“We can’t wait to see the creative designs that everyone comes up with, and we hope the competition can inspire the next generation to think more about how everyday changes can make a big difference.”

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To enter the competition, parents and teachers can submit their children's entries via email to foodwastecomp@aldi.co.uk.

Entries should be submitted alongside the name and county of each entrant.

Entries close on Monday, March 24.

For more information and T&Cs, visit: https://www.aldipresscentre.co.uk/food-waste-action-week-poster-competition-terms-conditions/

Sir Sadiq Khan has promised not to “move the goalposts” in relation to which cars and vans are exempt from paying the Ulez ultra-low emission zone levy.

At present, petrol vehicles with a “Euro 4” engine or newer and diesels with a “Euro 6” engine or newer are exempt from the £12.50-a-day levy, which is based on exhaust emissions.

Roughly speaking, this means that 20-year-old petrol cars and vans and 10-year old diesel vehicles will remain exempt from the Ulez levy.

The latest results on the impact of the Greater London Ulez – the zone was expanded across all 33 boroughs in August 2023 – found that 97.5 per cent of cars and 90.7 per cent of vans in outer London now comply with the rules.

This is credited with reducing nitrogen dioxide (NO2) roadside levels in outer London by 4.8 per cent.

However, despite the efforts to reduce emissions, there has been an increase in the total volume of traffic in London – and in congestion levels.

The total number of vehicles seen being driven in London on an average day has increased from 1.97m to 2.1m in the year to September 2024.

Announcing his plans to take the Ulez Londonwide, Sir Sadiq said in 2022 that it would tackle the “triple challenges of air pollution, climate change and congestion”.

During an interview with The Standard last week, Sir Sadiq was asked whether he planned to tighten the Ulez emission rules.

He said: “I have got no plans to move the goalposts in relation to the Ulez standards.

“Londoners have done, and are doing, the right thing: getting rid of non-compliant vehicles and, when they need a car, getting a compliant vehicle.”

Ross Lydall

According to Transport for London’s “one year on” report on the Greater London Ulez, the number of “non-compliant” vehicles seen driving in the outer London “doughnut” has fallen by 99,000 a day - down from 170,000 in June 2023 to 71,000 in September 2024.

Most petrol vehicles first registered after 2005 have a Ulez-compliant Euro 4 engine, while most diesel vehicles registered after 2015 have a Euro 6 engine.

Euro 7 emission rules, which set the toughest emission standards to date for new vehicles, will come into force on July 1, 2025. These are set by the EU and will not relate directly to the Ulez.

Mums for Lungs, a campaign group that has supported the Ulez, wants Sir Sadiq to go further than the current Ulez rules and introduce new restrictions on diesel vehicles, and also on wood-burning stoves in Greater London.

“This action on the Ulez has really paid off, but I think we need to have a conversation about London still being too polluted,” said Mums for Lungs founder Jemima Hartshorn. “Diesel vehicles and wood burning – they need to be tackled next.”

Campaigners are dismayed that a mayoral pledge to reduce car use by 27 per cent by 2030, as part of a series of options to make London “carbon neutral”, have been abandoned.

Asked how he planned to tackle road congestion, Sir Sadiq said he wanted to encourage “active travel” – walking, cycling and public transport – and for councils to gain powers to “charge utility companies for digging up our roads”.

He told The Standard: “If they are digging up our roads, that leads to congestion, because you have to have diversions. It also means buses are less reliable, and people are less keen to use buses and jump in their cars.”

TfL already operates a “lane rental” scheme that charges utility companies to dig up the main road network.

However it only operates on about 70 per cent of the TfL Road Network. TfL wants to expand the scheme to borough roads.

Latest TfL data shows that average bus speeds in 2024/25 were down year on year from 9.3mph to 9.2mph.

Over the last five years, the number of London bus journeys has plummeted from 2.112m in 2019/20 to 1.869m in 2023/24 – a fall of 11.5 per cent.

A report to TfL’s customer services committee said: “A wide range of issues contribute to this, including the impact of roadworks on London’s streets and generally higher levels of congestion on London’s roads.”

Ulez expansion to Greater London boundary has driven air pollution down, TfL reveals

Children's nanny receives 120 Ulez penalty fines after 'honest mistake' spiralled out of control

Labour will not repel the populist Right by pandering to resentment of the capital either

Dave Hill

There’s a war on, you might have heard. The Russians are coming. The Americans are going. Britain is bent on re-arming. Meanwhile, the government’s grail of greater growth keeps on receding, as tariffs are threatened and the productivity puzzle goes unsolved.

Where, then, will a big boost to the nation’s economy come from? From London, stupid. Where else? The capital’s 607 square miles produce 22 per cent of the the gross domestic product of the UK’s 94,000 square miles.

They generate almost the nation’s only annual “fiscal surplus”, meaning that more billions in taxes are raised in Greater London than are spent on it – £43.6 billion more, according to the most recent Office For National Statistics figures.

Apart from the South East, whose surplus is much smaller, every other English region, together with Scotland, Wales and North Ireland, runs a fiscal deficit, meaning they receive more in tax than they raise. London provides most of it.

This isn’t bragging. This is reality. It’s a reality that means when a government invests a pound in London, it gets its pound back more quickly than it would have had it invested it anywhere else, then sees it produce another pound more quickly too.

A stock grumble is that London receives more expenditure per head of population than anywhere else. This is true (though Scotland is close behind). But it is also true that Londoners per head produce far more revenue than they receive (and by this measure Scotland is a long way back).

London is by far the most productive part of the UK, with output per worker a massive 26.2 per cent above the UK average per hour worked. Again, this isn’t a Londoner bragging. Neither is it him carping about the taxes he pays subsiding public investment almost everywhere else in his country, be it in transport, policing or health. It’s called progressive redistribution. It’s no bad thing.

Again, this is reality. It is reality, even though the increase in London’s productivity rate has been small since the global financial crisis of 2008. What then, should a government in desperate need of greater national economic growth do?

Surely, you might think, it would seek to accelerate the productivity growth of its most productive region by investing more – in skills training, transport, housing, whatever makes most sense – in order to get more productivity bang for every buck, and more tax revenue to spend across the whole of the UK, including on defence. But how keen is it to do that?

Last week, it emerged that the government’s Plan for Neighbourhoods funding, a rebranded version of a Conservative policy would – like the Conservative policy – exclude neighbourhoods in the capital, despite Greater London having some of the highest rates of poverty anywhere.

At the weekend, Cabinet Office minister Pat McFadden made a point of saying he wanted to see more civil servants working outside of London. He framed this as a way for the state to get better value for money. Well, maybe. But his words still carried an echo of the Tories and their London-bashing “levelling up” message.

Then there’s the English devolution white paper, published in December. This pledged to “ignite growth in every region” by ending the pitting of towns and cities against each other and putting a stop to “micromanaging from the centre”.

Yet when it comes to “deepening devolution” the white paper is only “considering” how that principle can can apply to London, the part of the UK with the greatest growth potential of all – a potential whose fulfilment the whole of the country would benefit from financially.

It hasn’t all been discouraging. For example, Transport for London, following years of egregious top-down penny-pinching during the pandemic, has received an increase in capital funding. The Met has done better too. A bunch of boroughs have had their buckling budgets propped up. And let’s not underestimate the change of attitude – the Tories’ unending London-bashing is no more.

That said, Sir Keir Starmer’s administration still seems wary of being kind to the goose that lays the nation’s golden eggs – certainly of being seen to be kind.

Rachel Reeves, in her “kickstart” speech in January mentioned London five times, but in three cases preceded by the word “outside”, most notably by stressing that 60 per cent of the GDP increase would, according to one analysis, result from expanding Heathrow would benefit areas other than London and South East.

If there is reticence about acknowledging the massive importance of London’s economy to the UK’s, there may be depressing reasons for it.

Hatred of immigrants and loathing of “liberal elites” have long fuelled anti-London sentiment, a force that helped bring about Brexit and continues to feed the parasites of the populist Right.

Labour nerves appear jangled by the post-election opinion poll ratings of Reform UK. The need to defend Runcorn & Helsby following the resignation of Mike Amesbury may not have a calming effect. Some Labour MPs in the north of England are agitating for a more Farageist approach, seemingly persuaded that this would be the best way to repel Farage.

That seems a questionable thesis. Politicians should be mindful of the mood of electors, something Labour politicians have too often eschewed. The ones currently running the country are doing so because they dispensed with that bad habit. But wouldn’t it be wiser to drain the swamp from which Reform draws strength than to wade into that mire, trying to beat the enemy in its noisome natural habitat?

Far better, surely, to play primarily to your strengths, rebuilding the National Health Service, investing in better public transport, improving skills and education, increasing affordable housing, nurturing new industries and so on, and doing it in all parts of the UK that need those things.

That will cost money. That will take growth. Sidelining London won’t help.

OnLondon.co.uk provides unique, no-advertising and no-paywall coverage of the capital’s politics, development and culture. Support the website and its writers for just £5 a month or £50 a year and get things that other people won’t. Details HERE. Follow Dave Hill on Bluesky.

The London boroughs that have benefited most from the expansion of Sadiq Khan’s Ulez ultra-low emission zone can be revealed.

The zone expanded from inner London to the Greater London boundary on August 29, 2023, in what mayor Sir Sadiq hoped would result in cleaner air for five million Londoners.

Transport for London has now published data for the first year of the expansion, comparing the amount of pollution recorded with estimates of what the levels would have been like had the Ulez not been extended beyond the inner boundaries of the North and South Circular roads.

A Flourish map

Eleven boroughs each had the same cumulative benefit in reduced emissions, when falls in nitrogen oxides, carbon dioxide and PM2.5 particulates were estimated for 2024.

These boroughs were: Barking and Dagenham, Bexley, Bromley, Croydon, Enfield, Harrow, Havering, Hillingdon, Kingston, Merton and Sutton.

These boroughs each saw a 15 per cent reduction in NOx, a 32 per cent reduction in PM2.5s and a one per cent reduction in CO2.

The Tory boroughs of Bexley, Bromley, Harrow and Hillingdon had joined Surrey County Council in mounting a legal challenge to the Ulez expansion, but were defeated at the High Court.

The reduction in NOx being emitted from vehicle exhausts resulted in an average reduction in nitrogen dioxide (NO2) of 4.8 per cent across the outer London extension zone.

Across London, NO2 concentrations were 27 per cent lower compared with a scenario without any phases of the Ulez.

A Flourish chart

Announcing his plans to take the Ulez Londonwide, Sir Sadiq said in 2022 that it would tackle the “triple challenges of air pollution, climate change and congestion”.

The year-on report found there had been a one per cent reduction in CO2 emissions in outer London, and two per cent reduction in CO2 across all of London when including the effects of all three phases of the Ulez.

The primary aim of the Ulez was to reduce NO2, but it has also reduced PM2.5 levels.

NO2 is a toxic gas that exacerbates asthma, impedes lung development, and raises the risk of lung cancer.

The mayor has commissioned comprehensive analysis to determine how and when London can meet the World Health Organisation guidelines on NO2 and PM2.5s. The report will be published later in 2025.

Sir Sadiq said he had “no plans” to change the Ulez vehicle emission rules, despite calls for campaigners to go further and target diesel vehicles.

He has warned that a third runway at Heathrow airport would wipe out the environmental gains from the Ulez.

new campaign has launched to highlight the ease and benefit of contactless tap and go – with the modern payment system launching on Bee Network buses in two weeks’ time.

Already available on Metrolink, contactless tap and go will extend to include buses from 23 March, making it the quickest and easiest way to pay for travel across the Bee Network.

It means that bus passengers making multiple trips can add unlimited travel within a Metrolink zone – such as Manchester city centre – from just 40p a day.

Passengers will be able to use their contactless card, phone or smart watch on card readers on Metrolink stops or as they board the bus, in the same way that many customers already do on Metrolink, with the best value fare automatically calculated up to the daily or weekly cap.

The fares mirror the existing tickets that reduced the cost of combined bus and tram travel by around 20 percent when introduced in September 2023. As well as removing the need to plan or buy tickets in advance, contactless tap and go brings affordability together with ease and convenience.

Contactless tap and go is now the most popular way for Metrolink customers to pay for their travel, with more than 16.5 million journeys being made using it last year – a 20% increase on the previous year.

The addition of Bee Network buses puts Greater Manchester on an equal footing with other global cities that offer a multi-modal, integrated and capped payment system, including London, New York, Sydney and Madrid.

Mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, said:

“Until recently, bus passengers had to navigate dozens of different ticket types that varied wildly in price – with some single journeys costing upwards of £4.

“The introduction of contactless tap and go in two weeks’ time is the culmination of years of hard work to make travel easy, convenient and affordable. People might not realise just how much value there is to be had from the Bee Network.

“Anyone enjoying unlimited daily bus travel for £5 can add unlimited travel within any Metrolink zone, including Manchester city centre, for as a little as 40p. Making swapping between buses and trams more flexible and affordable really will be a game-changer for our residents.

“Record numbers of people are already using contactless tap and go on Metrolink. We’re now bringing our buses into the mix, with the aim to add trains in time. It all adds up to a more joined-up experience, like in London, where people choose to leave their car at home and get on board public transport.”

For people unfamiliar or unsure about contactless, videos showing its ease of use will appear across the Bee Network social channels as part of the campaign – with information about what to expect also appearing across Bee Network platforms, stops and interchanges.

As well as being a safe and easy way to pay, using contactless tap and go removes the need to plan journeys in advance; allows quicker boarding onto buses and trams; and helps cut waiting times to keep services reliable.