Air Pollution: Greater Manchester

(asked on 13th January 2022) - View Source

Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what (a) information his department holds and (b) estimate he has made of levels of air pollution at each motorway junction in Greater Manchester in the latest period for which information is available.


Answered by
Jo Churchill Portrait
Jo Churchill
Minister of State (Department for Work and Pensions)
This question was answered on 18th January 2022

The Defra Automatic Urban and Rural Network (AURN) and UK Urban NO2 Network (UUNN) have a combined 106 monitoring sites in Greater Manchester. We also model annual mean concentrations of air pollutants on urban major roads across the UK. However, we do not assess air pollution at motorway junctions because the Air Quality Standards Regulations stipulate that air quality should not be assessed in microenvironments, including within 25m of a junction.

There are locally managed sites in Greater Manchester, including sites monitoring urban traffic concentrations of particulate matter and nitrogen dioxide, located on 'Trafford A56' and 'Tameside A635 Manchester Road'.

The UK Air website provides data from monitoring sites within Greater Manchester, including locally managed sites and sites managed by Defra. This data is accessible through the following URL:

https://uk-air.defra.gov.uk/interactive-map?network=nondefraaqmon

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