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Environment Bill and clean air: another missed opportunity

The Environment Bill's delay pushes air quality further down the Government's agenda, seriously impeding our prioritisation of environmental issues and building a green recovery.

Blog post published on 26 January 2021 by Valentine Quinio

The decision to delay should be reversed

Initially planned to return to Parliament today, the Environment Bill has been delayed once again – this time for another six months at least. Continuing to deprioritise environmental issues will seriously harm our chances to build a green economic recovery, not least because a very important decision was at stake in the current bill: improving air quality by bringing air pollution targets in line with World Health organization guidelines. This is another missed opportunity, and the decision should be reversed. Here’s why:

Lack of certainty over air pollution targets

The Bill was initially presented to MPs in October 2019, following the release of the Clean Air Strategy in January 2019 which pledged “to set a new, ambitious long-term target to reduce people’s exposure to PM2.5” and sought to meet the World Health Organization guidelines. At the committee stage last March, MPs rejected proposals to bring air pollution targets in line with the WHO. Instead, the only commitment currently set out in the Bill is to set a target before October 2022- with no certainty over what this target will be.

Since then emissions in the UK have moved further away from the WHO’s target. Evidence shows that while the first lockdown lead to a short-lived improvement of air quality, the apparent switch to greater car use meant that in October it was worse than what it was pre-pandemic in many places.

Why deadly levels of PM2.5 need to be adressed

Politicians should be concerned about this because air pollution is a killer. In a landmark case last December, a nine-year old girl who died from an asthma attack after being constantly exposed to unlawful levels of air pollution in South London became the first person whose death certificate recognised air pollution as a cause of death. And this is not an isolated tragedy: our Cities Outlook publication showed that in 2017 alone, PM2.5 concentrations were estimated to be responsible for more than 14,400 attributable deaths in cities, including 5,900 in London, Manchester and Birmingham. When looking at the proportion of local deaths that can be attributed to long-term PM2.5 exposure, the chart below shows smaller cities such as Slough, Luton and Chatham also bear a large burden, with one in sixteen deaths caused by fine particulate matter (way higher than deaths that result from car accidents, for example).

Figure 1: Proportion of local deaths that can be attributed to long-term exposure to PM2.5, 2017

But most importantly, these deaths occur in spite of the UK meeting current legal limits, set by the EU at 25 µg/m3. The WHO guidelines are much stricter: they stipulate that levels should not exceed 10 µg/m3.

More than halving the legal limits value would indeed represent a significant challenge for the UK. Our data showed that approximately 62 per cent of modelled road links in UK cities exceed the WHO guidelines. If these were enshrined in law across the UK every single modelled road in 19 cities and large towns in England would breach legal limits.

Cities and large towns where every modelled road breaks World Health Organization guidelines for PM2.5 exposure:
Aldershot	Norwich
Basildon	Oxford
Cambridge	Peterborough
Chatham	Reading
Crawley	Slough
Ipswich	Southampton
London	Southend
Luton	Swindon
Milton Keynes	Worthing
Northampton

For now, Scotland is the only nation where WHO guidelines for PM2.5 are in law. The Scottish Clean Air Strategy (2015) already requires local authorities to meet the 10 µg/m3 objectives- and data shows that in the four Scottish cities that we study, all modelled roads are below that limit. If included in the Bill, these guidelines would extend to England and Wales.

Steps taken to combat air pollution

Cities in the UK and around the world have already made pledges to meet the 10 µg/m3 target. In October 2019, a list of 35 signatory cities members of the C40 group (including Berlin, Tokyo, Delhi, Barcelona, Paris and others) committed to enforce the WHO recommendations. The Mayor of London joined them by declaring that the capital would seek to comply with the WHO guidelines by 2030 and was followed by local authorities like the London boroughs of Hackney and Camden.

These are important steps, but in order to be effective, they need to be supported by a national legal framework. A stricter limit – and a defined target date- is expected by a number of experts organisations to generate a better, more efficient enforcement of policies which address PM2.5 emissions at their source, whether it is traffic-related or domestic combustion.

Air pollution remains an urban issue amid the pandemic

All of this was true before the Covid-19 crisis, and it is even more valid now. Pollution levels in the UK have already bounced back quickly. To improve air quality in cities, and therefore ensure that cities become healthier, better places to live, the Environment Bill must return to Parliament as soon as possible and be much tougher in its approach by including a commitment to adopt the WHO guideline on PM2.5, as a target to be met by 2030.