Air Pollution: Monitoring

(asked on 31st March 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 steps he took to ensure continuity in the real-time publication of monitoring data for particulate matter, PM2.5 and PM10, from the Automatic Urban and Rural Monitoring Network when changes were made to a service provider in 2021.


Answered by
Jo Churchill Portrait
Jo Churchill
Minister of State (Department for Work and Pensions)
This question was answered on 25th April 2022

The awarding of Automatic Urban and Rural Network (AURN) monitoring contracts are undertaken by the Environment Agency on behalf of Defra. The technical specifications which formed part of the invitation to tender for the AURN Central Management and Coordination Unit contracts were designed to ensure that any successful service provider had the required experience of data collection, data management and data dissemination to operate the networks.

To specifically ensure that any interruption in real-time data publication (which included PM10 and PM2.5) was kept to an absolute minimum in the event of a new service provider taking over operations, specific requirements were included in the contract’s ‘Critical Handover Requirements’ on real time data dissemination. For example, for the AURN there was a requirement for the service provider to demonstrate that they were able to successfully collect and disseminate 90% of the live data for the network sites they were awarded during the handover period prior to contract start. The handover period started 3 months prior to the start of the contract on the 01/10/21.

The main contract service provider for the AURN did not change, however the subsection of AURN sites in London did change service provider and no significant impact on real-time data publication of PM2.5 and PM10 occurred.

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