Improving Air Quality

Luke Pollard Excerpts

Thursday 28th June 2018 Commons Chamber

[Luke Pollard (Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport) (Lab/Co-op)]

I feel privileged to respond to this debate for the Opposition. This is my first time at the Dispatch Box, and I am glad we have had such a good debate, with valuable points made and much agreement on both sides of the House, and with most of my speech helpfully already made by others. I will pay tribute to Members as I go through.

In particular, I pay tribute to the superb report from the four Select Committees and to the points raised by the hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Neil Parish) and by my hon. Friends the Members for Nottingham South (Lilian Greenwood) and for Wakefield (Mary Creagh). I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Wakefield on the MP of the year award she was rightly given at the BusinessGreen leaders awards last night.

We can take two things from this debate. First, there is cross-party consensus that a crisis in air quality has been building for many years. Secondly, a number of voices from all sides, all parties and organisations are saying that the Government have been too slow in addressing this crisis and that more needs to be done. My west country neighbour, the hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton, said that bold action is absent, and he is right.

It is not an understatement to say poor air quality is a genuine public health emergency in our towns. We know that poor air quality and air pollution is linked to cancer, asthma, stroke and heart disease. As we have heard today from my hon. Friend the Member for Wakefield and from the hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton, poor air quality contributes to the early death of 40,000 people a year. That is 40,000 mums and dads, grandparents, brothers and sisters, and sons and daughters. These are not just statistics; each represents a family tragedy, many of which could be avoided with faster, better, more comprehensive and bold action from Ministers. We are talking about 13 deaths while this debate has been going on. Even the Government accept that they need to do more, so the challenge is: why are they not and can they do better now?

On legal limits, one of the most damning aspects of the Select Committees’ report was the comments from the UN special rapporteur, who said he was

“alarmed that despite repeated judicial instruction, the UK government continues to flout its duty to ensure adequate air quality and protect the rights to life and health of its citizens. It has violated its obligations”.

Last year, the Evening Standard found that pollution in more than 50 sites in London had breached EU limits. Further evidence from across the country shows that is happening not just in the capital, but across the UK. As we have heard today, it is not just in towns and cities, but in rural areas.

Sadly, the Government have had to be dragged through the courts, failing three times on air quality—in April 2015, November 2016 and February this year, when Mr Justice Garnham declared the Government’s failure to require action from 45 local authorities with illegal levels of air pollution in their area “unlawful”. It should not take the courts to get the Government to act on this. I appreciate that the Minister was not in his post at the time, but the Government he represents were.

A recent freedom of information request revealed that the Government have spent £500,000 fighting and losing dirty air court cases, with the most recent costing them £148,135. When we have got nothing from the VW emissions scandal, it is doubly concerning that this money the Government have spent on lawyers could have been spent on mitigations. It could have been spent on walking and cycling, on protecting primary schools from polluting roads or on promoting action on dirty diesel.

We have heard today about particulate matter, which needs further debate. We have heard a lot about PM_2.5 and PM₁₀, but there is too little research and often too little focus on the harmful effects of nanoparticles, which are even smaller than PM_2.5, and especially on the potential harm of magnetic nanoparticles entering the brain. I encourage the Minister to set out what he thinks can be done to undertake further research on nanoparticles in particular.

[Mary Creagh]

My hon. Friend has given me something else to worry about on my Committee—I thought it was just nanoplastics we had to be worried about. Does he agree that, whether we are discussing plastics in the ocean or pollution in the air, we have to stop treating our environment—our rivers and our air—as one great big garbage dump, because we are conducting a massive experiment on ourselves and on the planet, and we do not know where it is going to end?

[Luke Pollard]

My hon. Friend is exactly right and we need to talk about that much more. When we get into the detail of what is being said on not just plastics, but particles and air quality—the air we breathe and the things we throw away—we see that more and more education can produce better results.

In today’s debate, we have heard far too many examples of young people being exposed to harmful levels of particulate matter, as well as carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxide and low level ozone. Our young people deserve better than breathing poor air, and my right hon. Friend the Member for Exeter (Mr Bradshaw) is right to say that breathing clean air should be a human right. Exposure to PM_2.5 should not exceed 10 micrograms per cubic metre of air, according to the World Health Organisation, but in my Plymouth constituency the figure is 12 micrograms. In Saltash, just over the river, it is 11— the annual mean is 18 and 15 respectively.

Prince Rock Primary School, on my patch, knows all about that, as it is located on a busy road. We have heard from many other hon. Members about schools close to busy roads that are affected by poor air quality. Does the Minister have a similar school in his constituency? How many other Members have schools in areas of illegal air quality? The air quality close to our schools does matter. It matters to our young people. What is being done to educate teachers, children and parents about the risk of air pollution? As my hon. Friend the Member for Brentford and Isleworth (Ruth Cadbury) mentioned, turning engines off while idling can help, and walking or cycling to school can make a positive difference. These things all add up, but if initiatives such as the daily mile are through areas with poor air quality, the effect and positive contribution of that work can be limited. All our children deserve to breathe clean air.

The Government must not only talk the talk, but walk the walk. That is why what we have heard today about the VW emissions scandal should concern us all. The failure to ban diesel and petrol engines early enough was also mentioned by a number of hon. Members. Britain must wean itself off dirty diesel for cars and trains. As the hon. Member for South West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous) highlighted, the British Heart Foundation has found that even short-term inhalation of elevated concentrations of particulate matter increases the risk of heart attack occurring in just 24 hours, but the UK’s current legal limits for particulate matter are much less stringent than those of the World Health Organisation.

The flagship measure in the Government’s July 2017 air quality report was a pledge to ban new sales of conventional diesel and petrol cars by 2040. That is 22 years and more than four full-term Parliaments away. I wager not many of us will be in the House in 2040, such was the long-grassing of the commitment to finally get that introduced. However, it did not go far enough because hybrid sales would still be ignored. The Government have said themselves that

“almost all new cars and vans sold need to be near-zero emission at the tailpipe by 2040”

if they are to hit their air quality targets.

The Government’s lacklustre pledge was criticised by Mayors such as Sadiq Khan and Andy Street. We are in the slow lane when Britain should be leading. As my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham South highlighted so expertly, the plan for the UK to ban petrol, diesel and most hybrid cars by 2040 has been watered down, with Ministers now referring to it as a “mission”, and the much trumpeted “Road to Zero” strategy has been plagued with delays. Perhaps the Minister could explain what a “mission” is. It is not quite a commitment, less than a pledge, certainly not legally binding, perhaps more than a hope and a prayer, but not quite a plan. A mission simply is not good enough.

The Secretary of State for Transport has cancelled rail electrification, something rightly criticised in the recent Transport Committee report. Without rail electrification projects, Britain’s railways are still going to run on dirty diesel for many, many years to come.

We have heard today that the Government far too often work in silos. It is simply not good enough for DEFRA to push out press releases on air quality while the Department for Transport is busy pushing back commitments on diesel engines and cancelling electrification schemes. It does not have to be like this. Members have highlighted the urgent need for a clean air Act, and I am proud to say that Labour would introduce one. We will act on air pollution and deliver clean air for the many, not just the few. That really matters because, as the hon. Member for South West Bedfordshire said, this is about social justice. The links are there for all to see between poverty and poor air quality, and between the injustices of poorer communities breathing in poor-quality air and the shame that far too little has been done to help them.

The fact that the poorest communities are hit by the worst air pollution should shame this Government and shame our society. This issue goes right to the heart of inequality: if someone is poorer, the air that they breathe is of a lower standard than the air breathed by someone richer. That should be simply unacceptable in 2018. We need to be bold and tackle this invisible threat head on. Communities throughout the UK are suffering now, and if we do not deal with this, we will leave future generations with poorer health, poorer outcomes and more pollution to deal with. That is simply not acceptable.

The Committee on Climate Change reported today, 10 years after the Climate Change Act was delivered by a Labour Government, and it has delivered a damning verdict on this Government’s record. On air quality specifically, it doubles down on the point that we are not doing enough to modernise our transport sector, particularly the car industry. The report finds that the UK is on track to miss its legally binding carbon budgets in 2025 and 2030, due to lack of progress on cutting emissions from buildings and transport in particular. Lord Deben has said that the Government’s pledge to end the sale of pure petrol and diesel cars by 2040 is not ambitious enough, and he believes it is essential that we move the target closer to 2030, as do the Opposition.

We are not short of soundbites or press releases from DEFRA about air quality, but I say to the Minister that it is not the presentation that is at fault; it is the content, the substance, the plans, the action, the funding and the urgency. We all know what needs to be done, so I encourage him and his Department to get on with it.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on his maiden speech from the Dispatch Box.