Child asthma admissions fall 11% in Glasgow since low emission zone took effect

Emergency hospital admissions for asthma among children in Glasgow have fallen by 11% since the city began enforcing its low emission zone, with the sharpest decline in neighbourhoods closest to the restricted area, according to the first peer-reviewed assessment of the scheme’s health effects.

Researchers at the University of Glasgow and Public Health Scotland compared admissions for under-16s in the three years before enforcement began in June 2023 with the three years after, adjusting for seasonal flu, deprivation and the trend in Edinburgh and Dundee, where zones started later. In the 15 postcode districts within two kilometres of the zone the fall was 17%; in the rest of the city it was 6%.

Roadside monitors on Hope Street, which recorded an annual average of 57 micrograms of nitrogen dioxide per cubic metre in 2019, nearly 50% above the legal limit, measured 33 micrograms last year. The study, published on Monday in the journal Thorax, estimates that the zone has prevented around 260 child asthma admissions and 1,100 fewer GP visits a year.

“This is the clearest evidence yet from a British city that taking the most polluting vehicles off the road has a measurable effect on children’s lungs within a couple of years,” said Prof Anita Ghosh, who led the research. “We expected to see something. We did not expect it to be this large or this quick.”

Glasgow’s zone bars petrol cars registered before 2006 and diesels before September 2015 from an area of about a square mile around the city centre, with fines starting at £60 and doubling for repeat offences. More than 90,000 penalty notices were issued in the first year; the number has since fallen to about 1,200 a month.

The scheme was fiercely opposed at the time by taxi drivers, some of whom said they could not afford to replace their vehicles, and by a city centre business group that predicted a collapse in footfall. Council figures show pedestrian counts on Buchanan Street were 3% higher in 2025 than in 2022.

Critics said the study did not prove cause and effect. Dr Lachlan Monroe, a respiratory consultant who was not involved, said the authors had been careful but that asthma admissions were also falling nationally because of better inhaler prescribing. “The difference between the inner and outer city is the persuasive part,” he said. “If it were just better medicine you would not expect it to follow the ring road.”

For parents the figures are personal. Kirsty Dunlop, 37, whose son Finlay, nine, was admitted four times in 2022 with attacks that began on the walk to school along Cathedral Street, said he had not been in hospital since the spring of 2024. “I will not say it is only the zone,” she said. “But I can smell the difference on that street, and so can he.”