A lot has been said about Glasgow’s Low Emission Zone (LEZ) - but we owe it to those most vulnerable to the effects of toxic air to make sure that their voices are heard too.

The LEZ will mean fines for any vehicle which fails to meet required emissions standards, unless it is exempt, if it enters the city centre from June 1 next year.

Excluding the most polluting vehicles from our city is a big step - but it is needed.

Glasgow city centre has the worst air quality in Scotland. For many years, Hope Street has breached legal World Health Organisation limits.

But we also know that there is no safe level of air pollution.

There are many respiratory conditions made worse by air pollution. The most prevalent is asthma. There are around 75,000 people with asthma in the Greater Glasgow region, including around 14,000 children.

Campaigning charities like the Asthma and Allergy Foundation are clear that exposure to the kinds of pollution levels observed in Glasgow puts sufferers at risk of a potentially fatal attack.

We also know that the impact of air pollution is felt unequally.

It causes greatest harm to infants and children, the elderly, and pregnant women.

Recent research by the University of Aberdeen even found particulates caused by pollution in the developing foetus and early human brain.

Not dealing with this problem is effectively locking tens of thousands of people out of safely accessing our city centre. That is grossly unfair on them, and it will impact the economy more widely too.

We know that cutting pollution makes a difference on health outcomes.

In 2020/21, at the height of the pandemic, when there was much less pollution, 49 people per 100,000 in Scotland were hospitalised for asthma at least once.

That was down from a relatively constant value of around 90 per 100,000 over each of the 10 years before the pandemic.

Across all age and sex groups, hospitalisation was down between 43% and 56%.

There have been concerns raised about the impact of the new restrictions on specific vehicle operators, including the taxi trade.

There are challenges for the oldest vehicles that can’t be easily retrofitted. The costs of retrofit have also grown, meaning the grant funding available wasn’t delivering the level of support it should.

That’s why, when councillors agreed to the final LEZ plans in March, Greens called on the Scottish Government to do more.

That led to an extra £5m being made available via the national LEZ support fund for taxis.

We renewed a call for more support this week, when also agreeing a time-limited exemption for those taxis which cannot access a grant-funded retrofit solution.

This is a proportionate response that will help more taxis become compliant sooner, either through grant funding or giving them extra time, without compromising on the need to protect those at risk from toxic air.

Greens, like Glasgow MSP Patrick Harvie, have been campaigning on air pollution as a public health emergency for over a decade.

Glasgow’s LEZ will save lives and we should never forget that.