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Theresa May last night said she would protect diesel car owners who were conned into buying the polluting vehicles.

The Prime Minister stepped in as diesel owners face a nightmare of increased congestion charges, hikes in road tax and poor resale values.

Last night their anger intensified when Tony Blair’s former chief scientist admitted officials knew how dangerous diesel engines were but did nothing about it.

In a stunning admission, Sir David King said scientists were aware that diesel was a ‘dirty’ fuel which belched out more dangerous fumes than petrol engines. 

But he claimed he was convinced by car manufacturers that they were developing technology which could ‘manage the problem’. 

It resulted in climate change-obsessed ministers and civil servants offering tax incentives to encourage millions of motorists to switch to diesel vehicles.

Theresa May last night said she would protect diesel car owners who were conned into buying the polluting vehicles 

One furious MP said it was clear the public had been ‘mis-sold on diesel’.

But as London Mayor Sadiq Khan announced plans to charge diesel drivers £24 a day to enter the centre of the capital, Mrs May said people who had bought the vehicles in good faith should not be punished.

Speaking during a trip to the Middle East, the Prime Minister said the Government had no choice but to tighten  air pollution after it lost a High Court case last year. But she indicated ministers would step back from a plan to impose a £20-a-day ‘toxin tax’ on drivers of older diesels entering city centres.

Her comments piled pressure on Chancellor Philip Hammond to consider funding a so-called ‘scrappage scheme’ that would compensate owners of older diesels who agree to buy a new, cleaner car.

Mrs May said: ‘We will be producing a new air quality plan – we’ve been required to do that by the courts. But I’m very conscious of the fact that past governments have encouraged people to buy diesel cars and we need to take that into account.’

MPs welcomed the comments, which raised hopes that the Government had not ruled out a scrappage scheme which would offer diesel drivers tax incentives to trade in their cars for cleaner alternatives, such as hybrids and electric vehicles. The row erupted as Sir David admitted convincing Mr Blair that diesel engines were much better for the environment than petrol engines because they emit less carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas blamed for global warming.

Sir David’s advice helped convince then Chancellor Gordon Brown to introduce tax changes in 2001 to encourage people to switch to diesel cars, triggering a boom in sales. There are now almost 12 million diesel cars on the roads. But scientists have since performed a U-turn and warned that diesel cars emit more dangerous nitrogen oxides and sooty particulates which can cause respiratory disease.

Ministers have come under fire after spending years recommending that motorists should buy diesel cars

Sir David justified his flawed advice by saying the focus in the early 2000s was on reducing carbon emissions, and admitted he was aware of warnings – including from the Government’s own medical advisers in 1999 – that diesel engines produced more dangerous fumes. Sir David, who was the Government’s special representative for climate change until last month, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: ‘I think we, as it turns out, were wrong.’

But, in an extraordinary attempt to justify his advice, he suggested he was hoodwinked by car manufacturers over the efficacy of their new catalytic converters to reduce emissions

Charlie Elphicke, a Tory MP who sits on the Commons public accounts committee, said: ‘This looks like an incredible admission that millions of drivers were mis-sold on diesel. We’ve already seen sales of diesels slump – there is now a real danger resale values will drop too.

‘It’s wrong that people who thought they were doing the right thing now face losing personal wealth as a result.’

Howard Cox, of campaign group FairFuelUK, said: ‘I’m delighted the Prime Minister is receptive to the concerns of millions of hard-working diesel drivers who are being unjustly demonised.’

But yesterday Mr Khan announced plans to charge millions of motorists £24 a day just to use diesel cars in the centre of London. Owners of diesel cars made before 2015 will be hit with a £12.50 daily charge to use their vehicle anywhere between the North Circular and South Circular roads from 2021. The levy will also apply to petrol cars registered before 2006. This is on top of the current £11.50 congestion charge.

Councils across the country are considering similar measures, but Mrs May’s comments suggest ministers will be ordered to adopt a less aggressive approach.

Government sources last night insisted a tough new plan to tackle air pollution was inevitable after last year’s court ruling, but they distanced themselves from the idea of a £20-a-day charge – and left the door open to introducing a scrappage scheme. 

Hoodwinked by a green zealot: How ideologist behind dash for diesel called C02 'worse than terror' 

By Victoria Allen, Science Correspondent, for The Daily Mail

Professor Sir David King, 77, was the architect of the policy to cut fuel duty for diesel cars as Tony Blair’s personal scientist

The scientist behind the dash for diesel is a committed climate change activist who once described global warming as a greater threat than terrorism.

Professor Sir David King, 77, was the architect of the policy to cut fuel duty for diesel cars as Tony Blair’s personal scientist.

Yesterday he admitted he got it wrong, having been driven by an obsession with carbon emissions. The former Government chief scientific adviser, knighted in 2003, has presided over many controversies.

In 2004 he wrote in the journal Science: ‘In my view, climate change is the most severe problem that we are facing today – more serious even than the threat of terrorism.’

He refused to back down when called in to Parliament and asked about his comments, which came just three years after the 9/11 attacks.

Sir David also persuaded Tony Blair to order a mass cull of livestock after being put in charge of handling the foot-and-mouth crisis.

In 2007, the South Africa-born academic divided opinion by recommending a badger cull to control the spread of TB. He has also been a long-term supporter of GM food.

His strong belief in man-made climate change has seen him publish a book, The Hot Topic, on how to tackle global warming, and he has been accused of being a politician in scientist’s clothing for his strong views. Just over a decade ago the chemist warned that temperatures will rise to dangerous levels within decades, leaving large sections of Britain’s coastline under water, while 400 million people could go hungry.

He has also said that global warming is pushing thousands of animals and plants towards extinction.

Sir David has stuck to his guns on GM crops, which he claimed had cost Britain up to £4billion through the country’s failure to embrace them.

In 2003 he chaired the Government’s GM Science Review Panel, at the time of allegations that a leading member of the scientific establishment had warned senior academic Dr Andrew Stirling his career would be ruined unless he stopped questioning the safety of so-called Frankenstein food. Sir David admitted he had made no effort to identify the culprit, despite the resignation of another expert, Professor Carlo Leifert, in protest at the influence of GM supporters on the panel.

Also in 2003, he backed research to create animal-human embryos, saying they could have ‘massive impacts’ on society, generating treatments for conditions from Alzheimer’s to heart disease.

He was appointed permanent Special Representative for Climate Change in September 2013 and left the post last month.

Monstrous betrayal linked to thousands of deaths

By Ross Clark for The Daily Mail 

Like thousands of drivers in Britain, I have unwittingly found myself with a monster on my driveway. My modest Citroen estate is among the 10.7million vehicles that stand accused of contributing to nearly 12,000 deaths a year in Britain alone.

And now I discover that along with all other owners of pre-2015 diesel cars, I am facing the prospect of huge extra charges when I venture onto the road. Yesterday, Mayor of London Sadiq Khan announced we will be hit with a daily fee of up to £24 – a £12.50 diesel penalty plus the standard £11.50 congestion charge – for entering a new ‘ultra low emission zone’ when it is introduced in London’s city centre in April 2019.

Where London leads, others follow: 35 other cities are considering similar penalties. It may yet get worse: while several councils already charge more for diesels to park on the streets, Merton, south London, will triple the cost of parking permits for diesel cars.

It’s certainly quite a change from when I bought my car seven years ago. Then, I seemed to be doing exactly what the government wanted me to do: switching from petrol to diesel because it was, allegedly, ‘better for the environment’.

Like thousands of drivers in Britain, I have unwittingly found myself with a monster on my driveway. My modest Citroen estate is among the 10.7million vehicles that stand accused of contributing to nearly 12,000 deaths a year in Britain alone

But as the Daily Mail reports today, Sir David King, chief scientific adviser to the Blair and Brown governments, has now admitted he was wrong to recommend to ministers that they incentivise motorists to switch from petrol to diesel.

Of course, King, a long-standing ideologue on green issues who has just stepped down as the Government’s special representative for climate change, denies he is to blame. He says he was hoodwinked by car manufacturers who, as we now know, were cheating on tests supposed to ensure their vehicles met strict new emission limits.

Frankly, it is hard not to see all this as one of the greatest wrongdoings carried out against an unwitting public. Millions bought diesels in good faith, not knowing they would contribute to catastrophic pollution. From workmen in white vans to families buying a 4x4 for the school run, drivers are now having to face the fact that their car is a vehicular pariah which may cost them a small fortune to use in urban areas.

In some ways diesels are less polluting than petrol engines – they produce less carbon monoxide. But in other ways they are far worse, producing much larger quantities of poisonous nitrogen oxides, and soot particles, both of which can harm the lungs. Putting aside the hyperbole of pressure groups – such as Clean Air, which recently called diesel engines ‘the biggest health catastrophe since the Black Death’ – the statistics on deaths related to pollution from diesel engines are deeply depressing. Nitrogen oxides – the main source of which, in polluted areas, is from diesel engines – caused 11,940 premature deaths in 2013, according to the European Environment Agency.

Under current Vehicle Excise Duty bands drivers of diesel vehicles generally pay less - because the cars emit less CO2 despite producing other dangerous fumes

Diesel cars on UK roads are emitting more than nine times the level of dangerous pollutants permitted by carmakers’ own limits – with virtually all major manufacturers implicated in selling dangerously polluting cars.

That, coupled with the massive expansion in the number of diesel cars – by 2015 nearly every other car in Britain was a diesel – has led to a public health emergency.

So just how did we get to this point? Back in 1990, diesel cars were a niche product, accounting for just 6.4 per cent of new car sales in Britain. Efforts to reduce pollution were concentrated on the petrol-fuelled vehicles driven by the overwhelming majority of British motorists.

In the late Eighties, manufacturers were forced to switch cars to unleaded petrol. By the early 1990s, catalytic converters – devices fitted to exhausts which remove harmful emissions – had become standard on petrol engines (though not diesel ones), too. The diesel scandal – or Dieselgate – can be traced back to the Kyoto agreement on climate change made in 1997, when the developed world agreed to cut carbon emissions by 8 per cent over 15 years.

In June 1998, during Britain’s presidency of the EU, the European Council held a meeting to discuss how to achieve this. In the chair was John Prescott, then secretary of state for the environment and transport. Environment minister Michael Meacher and transport minister Gavin Strang were also present, as was Neil Kinnock, then in his lucrative term as the EU’s commissioner for transport.

They did discuss air pollution more generally at the meeting, but it was clear where the priority now lay: the Council’s minutes state it ‘recognises that policies and measures to reduce the high forecast growth in CO2 [carbon dioxide] emissions from transport are essential’.

This graphic shows the amount diesel drivers will pay under the plans compared to car owners who drive petrol and electric vehicles

A month later, the Commission had stitched up a deal with the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association agreeing that manufacturers would reduce the average level of carbon dioxide emitted by cars to 140g per km by 2008 – a 25 per cent reduction on 1995 levels. For the car industry, there was a simple solution. Diesel cars emitted, mile for mile, around 15 per cent less carbon dioxide than equivalent petrol cars.

Manufacturers merely had to persuade their customers to switch to diesel and they would be a long way to meeting their target. In Britain, the Labour government was happy to help. In 1998, the then-chancellor Gordon Brown announced that ‘diesel cars should attract less vehicle tax than their petrol equivalents because of their better CO2 performance’.

He was as good as his word. In his 1999 Budget, he announced a new system of Vehicle Excise Duty (VED) designed to incentivise motorists to buy more fuel-efficient cars – with vehicles classified in four bands according to their carbon emissions.

After the turn of the century, the government – presumably at the behest of its scientific adviser David King – was continuing to push the sale of diesel cars.

By 2009, there were 13 bands of VED based purely on carbon emissions, the lowest of which attracted no duty at all. At the same time, Brown slashed fuel duty for diesel. In his 2001 Budget, the chancellor reduced the duty on low-sulphur petrol by 2p, but the duty on low-sulphur diesel by 3p. (Incidentally, Sadiq Khan was a transport minister in Gordon Brown’s government and seemed to have no problem with diesel incentives then.)

If this had been done in innocence or even ignorance of potential hazards, then perhaps we could forgive Brown & Co. But the polluting and health problems of diesel engines were known about. In 2001, the European Respiratory Journal had published a review of various studies which linked diesel emissions to lung problems. The study found that cars with diesel engines emitted 100 times as much particulate pollution than did equivalent petrol engines.

Yesterday, Sir David King said he had thought this didn’t matter because diesel engines would become much cleaner over the coming years. Nor did the EU or our own government do anything about the growing evidence that something was not right in manufacturers’ official figures.

The large discrepancy between emissions of nitrogen oxides in laboratory tests compared to vehicles driven on the road, was known about as early as 2005.

It wasn’t until 2015 that Volkswagen was finally caught out for having embedded software in its cars that allowed them to ‘cheat’ the tests.

Now, ministers have floated the idea of a scrappage scheme. But it must be the guilty car manufacturers, not taxpayers or motorists, who pay for this appalling scandal. I’m already reluctant to drive my Citroen and I’ll gladly see it go to the scrapheap – as soon as I am offered a cleaner one in return.