Air Pollution: Ethnic Groups and Females

(asked on 21st July 2020) - 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 assessment the Government has made of the effect of air pollution on (a) BAME communities and (b) women.


Answered by
Rebecca Pow Portrait
Rebecca Pow
Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs)
This question was answered on 1st September 2020

As part of the UK Plan for tackling roadside nitrogen dioxide (NO2), the Government reviewed evidence investigating the inequalities in the distributional impact of poor air quality. The published technical report references research conducted by Fecht et al (2015) that demonstrates that higher concentrations of NO2 and coarse particulate matter (PM10) have been observed in ethnically diverse neighbourhoods.

Additionally, in 2020 the Office for National Statistics published a report on Coronavirus mortality rates and air quality. Data analysis highlighted that ethnicity is strongly correlated with pollution exposure, with ethnic minorities more likely to live in polluted areas. To date, the Government has not investigated whether there are air pollution inequalities between women and men. Such analysis would be particularly challenging due to the fixed nature of the Government's air quality monitoring stations; the monitoring network limits our ability to make robust inferences about air pollution exposure at places of work, within households or at an individual level.

The Government is taking a proactive approach to tackling air pollution concentrations through the NO2 plan and Clean Air Strategy, both of which will improve air quality across the UK. Furthermore, those actions that focus on reducing the highest concentrations of harmful pollutants will disproportionately benefit ethnically diverse communities that are located in areas of poor air quality.

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