How a Clean Air Zone charge becomes a penalty
There is no windscreen ticket and no barrier. A camera reads your plate as you drive in, checks your vehicle against DVLA emissions records, and if it is not compliant, you owe that day’s charge. You then have 6 days to pay it. Only if you miss that window does a Penalty Charge Notice follow, by post, to the registered keeper: £120, reduced to £60 if paid within 14 days.
The national compliance standard is the same in every city: Euro 4 for petrol engines, Euro 6 (or VI for HGVs and buses) for diesel. Roughly, that means most petrol cars from 2006 onwards and most diesel cars from 2015 onwards are exempt. Older than that, you likely pay, unless the vehicle is exempt for another reason (disabled tax class, historic vehicle, and a few others).
The seven zones, and what they actually charge
Each city sets its own class, which decides which vehicles pay. Class B exempts cars and vans entirely; Class C exempts cars; Class D charges cars too.
| City | Class | Car / taxi / van | Bus / coach / HGV | Started |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bath & North East Somerset | C | £9/day (van, taxi) | £100/day | 15 Mar 2021 |
| Birmingham | D | £8/day (incl. cars) | £50/day | 1 Jun 2021 |
| Portsmouth | B | £10/day (taxi only) | £50/day | 29 Nov 2021 |
| Bradford | C+ | £9/day (van) | £50/day | 26 Sep 2022 |
| Bristol | D | £9/day (incl. cars) | £100/day | 28 Nov 2022 |
| Newcastle & Gateshead | C | £12.50/day (van) | £50/day | 30 Jan 2023 |
| Sheffield | C | £10/day (taxi, van) | £50/day | 27 Feb 2023 |
Bath was the first Clean Air Zone outside London. Ordinary cars only pay in Birmingham and Bristol, the two Class D zones, everywhere else a compliant private car passes free.
A different court form if it escalates. If a Clean Air Zone PCN goes unpaid, enforcement uses the TE7 and TE9 forms, the same family used for Dart Charge and Mersey Gateway, because all three are legally “road user charging” schemes rather than ordinary parking enforcement. See our Dart Charge and Mersey Gateway guide if that stage is relevant to you.
Oxford is different: the Zero Emission Zone
Oxford does not have a standard Clean Air Zone, which is why it is missing from official CAZ lists. It has a much smaller Zero Emission Zone (ZEZ), a pilot covering nine streets in the city centre, run jointly by Oxfordshire County Council and Oxford City Council since 28 February 2022. The logic is different too: almost any non-electric vehicle pays, hybrids included, banded by emissions from £2 to £10 a day, rising to £4 to £20 from August 2025. A wider zone has been proposed for years but has not gone ahead, the ZEZ is still pilot-only.
How to appeal
Every zone uses the same route as a normal council PCN:
- Make representations to the council within 28 days, free, through the city’s own portal.
- If rejected, you get a Notice of Rejection with a right of appeal.
- Appeal to the Traffic Penalty Tribunal, free, at tpt.gov.uk, decided by an independent adjudicator.
The grounds that actually work are compliance-based, not the usual parking grounds: your vehicle is genuinely compliant and the DVLA record is wrong (common with imports, retrofits and recent changes of ownership), you already paid but for the wrong plate, or an exemption applied but was not registered in time. Our free letter tool is built around parking and moving-traffic grounds and does not yet cover this compliance-record style of appeal, so for now use the council’s own challenge form, it asks for exactly this evidence: Birmingham, Bradford, Bristol, Sheffield, Newcastle & Gateshead, Bath, Portsmouth.
A note on our own data. The Traffic Penalty Tribunal’s published figures attribute roughly 1,900 “Clean Air Zone” appeal outcomes to Torridge District Council in a single year, a small rural Devon authority with no Clean Air Zone. We could not find any real scheme behind this and believe it to be a mislabelling in the tribunal’s own dataset, not a real charge. We are not hiding the number, but we are not going to pretend it means Torridge has a Clean Air Zone either.