Linking Emission Surcharge Cars to London’s Demographic Structure

So far, we’ve seen that there is significant geographical variation in the registrations of vehicles which are not compliant to the proposed Emission Surcharge and that this variation clusters in certain hot-spots and cold-spots across the neighbourhoods of London. It is likely that the geographical variation and clustering that we have observed is associated with the underlining demographic structure of London’s populace. In order to consider this issue, we’ve linked the car fleet compliance data with the 2011 population census to see how the rate of non-compliant vehicles is related to a number of key demographic characteristics.

The scatterplots presented above display the rate of non-compliant vehicles (on the Y-axis/vertical axis) against a number of London’s demographic attributes, some of which are protected characteristics included in the Equalities Act of 2010. Starting at the top left and then reading across and then down, we see that greater rates of non-compliance are associated with lower levels of household income, higher levels of unemployment, higher levels of people with bad or very bad health, higher levels of black, asian or minority ethnic (BAME) populaces, higher levels of muslim populaces and higher levels of households classified as lone parents. This indicates that certain demographic cohorts are likely to be more exposed to the introduction of the Emission Surcharge, meaning that the impact of this proposed policy may be greater on certain types of people as compared to others.