COP26 and Air Pollution

Debate between Gary Streeter and Peter Dowd

Tuesday 2nd November 2021 Westminster Hall

[Peter Dowd (Bootle) (Lab)]

Thank you, Sir Gary. It is a real pleasure to serve under your chairship.

On COP, air quality and the impact on health and wellbeing, we have to drill down to the specifics. We can talk at a national, international or regional level, but it always comes down, in effect, to what is happening in local communities, with the cumulative effect in them. My local community, like those of my right hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) and other hon. Friends, is no different.

My area has a huge dock in it. The Liverpool docks are based in my constituency, and we have thousands of lorries coming down the road, the A5036, all the time—daily, of a night, at weekends. They are great pollutants, as are local cars and local transport. The council has had five monitoring stations in the area, and a sixth up and running, and since covid those levels have been dramatically down. That should teach us a lesson, which is that we have to get vehicles, whether they be lorries or cars, off the road.

I am really disappointed, notwithstanding COP and notwithstanding covid, that National Highways—it used to be Highways England, which used to be the Highways Agency, and I think it changes its name so we can never keep up with what it is at and hold it to account—persists with this old-fashioned view, which must be 20 years out of date, that if there is a problem with a road, the solution is to build another one. That is exactly what it is proposing in my constituency. It is proposing to build a £250 million road through Rimrose valley. Rimrose Valley Friends has done a great job opposing it, but there will be a £250 million road through the only green part of my constituency. It is possible to walk from one end of the constituency to the other in about 35 or 40 minutes, and the same in the other direction, so it is incredibly tight. Within it there is this lung, Rimrose valley, and what does the Highways Agency or Highways England or whatever it is called nowadays—National Highways—do? It is going to put a road through it, and that is not acceptable.

I ask the Minister to go back and speak to her colleagues and get that process halted—put a stop to it—pending the lessons learned from covid and pending COP. Departments and agencies pushing on with the same old hackneyed solutions will not be a resolution for any of us. The local authority is trying to do what it can, but it can only do so much. We have money for an air quality grant, which is helping us to educate, and we are working collaboratively as much as the local authority can, but it is not much. We need national action, and we need the Department to get a grip of National Highways and to call a halt to this programme. It should discuss it with local people, discuss it with the port and discuss it with all interested parties, and just stop this madness continuing, because it is not acceptable.

I will make a final point, if I may. We have that going on, but we have the docks—a major, massive dock—and they are only going to expand because there will be more containers coming in through the north, as another alternative, because of covid. What I want to do is to work collaboratively with everybody to stop the road being built. Let us rethink the issue. Because we are in a port area, we have scrapyards, but for the third or fourth time in the last few years we have had massive fires that are adding to the problem. It is not just about cars and lorries, but about all the other associated things. Let us get a grip of this, let us do better enforcement and let us stop the cheating on emissions. Let us get to grips with this issue, stop that road going through and work with our communities to sort out the problem.

[Sir Gary Streeter (in the Chair)]

Thank you, colleagues, for your co-operation. We now come to the Front-Bench speeches.