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 is taking to help ensure that local authorities have the capacity to accurately monitor levels of air pollution in their area to inform local clean air strategies.

Through the statutory Local Air Quality Management (LAQM) framework, local authorities are required to review and assess air quality in their area and provide a summary of their assessment in an Annual Status Report. Defra provides technical and policy guidance to local authorities to assist them in meeting these LAQM responsibilities. Defra also provides a dedicated local air quality management Helpdesk (phone, email and webpage) and calculation tools to support local authorities in their monitoring efforts.

Local authorities receive grant-in-aid to cover their LAQM duties. In addition, Defra’s Air Quality Grant scheme provides funding to local authorities and supports schemes which help councils monitor and implement measures to improve air quality in local communities. We have increased the funding pot available to local authorities in this year’s Air Quality Grant by £6 million.

Defra also fund the UK Automatic Urban and Rural Network, which is comprised of 171 monitoring sites and provides data to measure compliance with the Air Quality Standards Regulations (2010). The number and location of these sites have been carefully selected to minimise uncertainty and to be representative of the whole of the UK. Defra’s UK-Air website displays near real time measurements from these monitoring sites (https://uk-air.defra.gov.uk/networks/network-info?view=aurn).