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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what assessment his Department has made on the feasibility of enshrining the World Health Organisation's air quality targets into UK law.

In our Clean Air Strategy, published in January, we set out our ambition to reduce people’s exposure to PM_2.5, and committed to publishing a report early this year examining what action would need to be taken to meet the World Health Organization’s PM_2.5 annual mean guideline level of 10μg/m³. That evidence is still being gathered, and we will publish the report in due course.

We are the first major economy to set out ambitions based on the World Health Organization’s PM_2.5 targets, and our Clean Air Strategy was welcomed by the WHO’s Director General as “an example for the rest of the world to follow.”