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

To ask Her Majesty’s Government how many government press releases have been issued since May 2014 alerting the media to an air pollution episode.

Defra routinely publishes on the UK-Air website Met Office air pollution forecasts and real-time monitoring data, which shows air pollution levels across the UK. Defra also issues daily tweets from the UK-Air Twitter account, which provides the latest information about current air pollution levels and health advice. These are followed by journalists who use this to inform their reporting, as well as health charities and campaign groups who regularly retweet information to vulnerable populations. Given that this system is in place, Defra does not routinely issue press releases during air pollution episodes, but has done so on three occasions.

Since the beginning of May 2014 there have been 27 air pollution episodes. A total of 441 tweets have been issued from Defra’s UK-Air Twitter account on these occasions. Public Health England retweets these messages, as do their devolved counterparts in cases where episodes affect their territories.

Defra also alerts its network of health charities on each occasion. These alerts provide full details of the nature of the air pollution episode, its anticipated duration and links to further information including specific health advice relevant to the episode.

An air pollution episode is defined as a period during which the level of any measured pollutant monitored by the UK’s network of air pollution monitoring sites has recorded High or Very High against the Daily Air Quality Index (DAQI). Also, when ozone is measured to have breached the Information threshold of 180 microgrammes per cubic metre for one hour (as defined in air quality legislation) this is classified as an air pollution episode.