Lessons from lead fuel ban can assist net zero pursuit

He ran some of the most important public campaigns of the late 20th Century but you may not recognise the name. Des Wilson tells Utility Week what his years of lobbying, including for the removal of lead in petrol, can teach us about tackling today’s challenges.

Des Wilson has one last campaign in his sights. And his opponents underestimate him at their peril.

Wilson may not be a household name anymore but he has led – and won – campaigns as varied as removing lead from petrol, introducing Freedom of Information (FOI) legislation, cracking down on tobacco sales to children and introducing Sunday trading, among others. He made his name as the co-founder of homeless charity Shelter and later oversaw the creation of the Liberal Democrats and chaired Friends of the Earth.

Long retired from public life, the 83-year-old still cannot walk away from a fight, as he explains to me when we meet at his over-50s leisure centre in Hastings.

He is in the middle of regaling me with his memories of forcing Margaret Thatcher into a famous U-turn 40 years ago, when a fellow member of the centre pauses to congratulate him on a more recent victory.

His eyes twinkle when I ask him what he’s been up to now. “We play table tennis every Friday afternoon but the manager wants to shift it to Sundays. Not while I’m around he won’t. I spoke to his boss today and I think we’ll win.”

I don’t doubt it and my respect for this veteran troublemaker’s skill at campaigning has brought me here to ask him how he would make the case for investment in net zero and the wider protection of the environment, as well as the continuing challenge of lead.

He is initially modest about what he will be able to contribute to current debates but as he recounts his many successes in convincing public and politicians to back his causes, a number of parallels emerge.

He returns to one key principle a number of times during the conversation:

“Whether I was talking to politicians, industry or the public, I would essentially be saying the same thing – I have no doubt I’m on the right side of the argument here, but are you?”

Give me Shelter

Wilson’s autobiography, published in 2011, is entitled ‘Memoirs of a Minor Public Figure’. It’s a deliberately self-effacing stance but does reflect the unusual position he occupied. In the 1980s and 1990s he was a regular fixture on TV, radio and in newspapers, specialising in fiery encounters with his opponents. His landmark Campaign for Lead Free Air (Clear) alone should have secured his place in recent social history, yet there is very little material about him online and the several books he has penned are out of print. (See box for his full CV)

However, his victories live on. His first notable success came a few years after he moved to London from his native New Zealand and found himself as the lead volunteer for a new ‘Oxfam for the home front’ with the mission of addressing homelessness. Thus, Shelter was born in 1967 – and with it, an unwitting campaigner.

“I knew it was wrong that people were living this way and I seemed to know how to get people to listen. But I had no experience and no plan for what came next.

“When I eventually annoyed the housing minister enough for him to invite me in he said: ‘So Mr Wilson, you’ve got our attention, what is it you want us to do?’. Well, I didn’t have a bloody clue.”

By the time he reached his most notable battle a decade and a half later, Wilson had learnt his lesson. The Clear campaign to ban leaded petrol had a very prominent call to action. Looking back, it is the sheer speed of the win and the subsequent transition that stands out and surely has parallels for the electric vehicle (EV) rollout.

When Wilson took on the cause in 1981 there was widespread ignorance and/or apathy about the harmful levels of lead in the air as a result of motor emissions. But within just two years, an initially obstinate government had ordered petrol forecourts to switch to unleaded and car manufacturers to make engines that could use it. A decade later sales of cars without catalytic converters were banned across the UK and by 2000 leaded petrol had completely disappeared from the pumps. That’s less than 20 years to transition the country’s entire vehicle fleet to a new source of power.

With an equally massive shift needed towards EVs and low-carbon technology more widely, there are clearly lessons to learn from Wilson’s success.

“You need an evidence base to back up your campaign – but maybe more important than the evidence itself is when you deploy it”, Wilson says.

He points to a leaked letter from a government official in 1981 revealing the government was well aware of the ultimate health implications of leaded petrol.

“I could have waved that around at the launch and said – see, they know. But I knew instinctively that it was better to let them come at us, tell us we’re wrong, demand to see the evidence. And then we dropped the letter. They were clearly lying and from then on we became the trusted party.”

Asked how he would approach the shift to EVs, Wilson says he would lean into the overwhelming evidence of the impacts of climate change and play up the impact of personal responsibility.

“The most important thing I could share with you about changing people’s minds is show them how it affects the children. Use simple evidence to show how the actions taken now could affect their children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren. Even if they don’t have children, there’s something about that primal connection that everyone can somehow grasp. I’ve seen it in action and it’s very powerful.”

While clearly the emotional connection to tackling climate change is key, can this outweigh fears about the cost and possible disruption of the transition?

Wilson faced similar protestations about the shift to unleaded petrol and insists “you always have to take the time to understand the argument of the other side and find a way to answer it or cut it off”.

He adds: “For the lead campaign, we kept coming back to what you value most, this hypothetical cost in the short term or the long-term cost of this proven damage to young people’s bodies.”

A successful campaign must also make very clear what it is not asking for, Wilson argues. He points to two other successful crusades where he was able to disarm his opponents by addressing their chief criticisms head-on.

First is the push for FOI legislation, which was initially opposed by civil servants on security grounds.

“When I spoke to them, I’d kick off by saying here’s what we don’t want: We don’t want information that endangers our security. We don’t want information that makes it more difficult for the police to catch criminals. We don’t want anything that invades your personal privacy.

“We made it very simply about people’s right to see information about themselves – health records, their kid’s school records. We made it about the people again. We created this upward pressure and at the same time we tackled the chief concerns of our opponents.”

Wilson describes this process of building support from the public upwards by drawing a sketch of a volcano on my notepad, showing the foundation of public pressure pushing up through various layers of bureaucracy and vested interests before forcing a political eruption.

In his early-90s battle to crack down on underage tobacco sales, Wilson’s campaign faced accusations of nanny-statery, which will be familiar to some proponents of net zero.

He brings it back to his chief weapon of persuasion: “I was quite clear, if you want to smoke, that’s fine. But what about your kids? So this message wasn’t coming from campaigners, it was coming from parents. That’s one of the most powerful voices you can have behind you if you’re trying to win an argument.”

Poacher turned gamekeeper

This has obviously been an effective strategy but does it come across as well when the messenger is a private company such as a utility, especially given public sentiment around the sector? Wilson has experience here as well, having been hired by the owner of Heathrow Airport in the mid-90s to lobby for its expansion with Terminal 5.

This put Wilson uncomfortably at odds with public opinion but he insists he never doubted the cause.

“They were concerned and had every right to be. But I was able to bring a lot of my techniques to play, including not shying away from their concerns but addressing them head on. We took those points into the heart of the planning and at the same time we showed them what this meant for local jobs and all the nearby businesses that fed off Heathrow. We’d been very bad at telling that story.”

Wilson’s six years working for BAA allowed him to put into practice theories he had been espousing for several years around corporate social responsibility – a phrase that was then far from common in boardrooms.

Having worked with the local community to understand their key concerns about the expansion of the airport, BAA then made five pledges, including not increasing overall noise, road traffic or quota of night flights.

Wilson says: “From the start, we were determined the answer could not be a cosmetic one. The company had to make real concessions to local concerns. It had to come up with practical solutions to real problems.”

Three years later the company had worked out how to meet all five pledges.

For all his varied successes – and there are many more we’ve been unable to cover – there is a Clear winner and his success in banning leaded petrol remains his proudest achievement. The traces of lead still detected in London air at the start of this decade highlight how important it was to act, and act quickly.

Tightening of regulations around lead in drinking water have seen those levels drop dramatically as well but challenges remain, particularly around schools. Water companies are understandably nervous about how politicians and the public would respond to them lobbying for more focus (and therefore money) to remove lead. But Wilson brings it back to his central point.

“I never regretted the side of the argument I chose and that helped me get over whatever obstacles were put in my way. I just knew I was right and that’s infectious. And our opponents should have been smart enough to realise that. They should have dealt with it themselves and not waited till they were forced to.”

Clearly he enjoyed the tussle and relished taking the moral high ground. Appearing on the Today programme in 1990 he asked a lobbyist for the tobacco industry, who had previously defended leaded petrol, “what’s next? Are you planning to work for the Columbian drug barons?”.

He also claimed some impressive scalps: “At the start, Thatcher didn’t want to know [about the dangers of leaded petrol] but she ended up being forced to climb down just to get us off her back. Her political advisor eventually came to see us and asked ‘how can we do this without humiliating ourselves?’.”

Wilson is adamant he is retired but says if he were a younger man net zero would have been an obvious cause for him. I can imagine him taking on the ill-informed scare-mongering and vested interests with the kind of ammunition the energy transition would give him.

But at least we have his legacy, in the battles he won and the lessons he can share.

Now one last campaign awaits. And I can’t see ping pong moving from Friday afternoons anytime soon.

This article first appeared in Utility Week’s Digital Weekly edition. To read the issue in full, click here.