Urgent action is needed across Government to address the ‘invisible health crisis' caused by air pollution - and bring the UK in line with EU air quality laws, said Pavilion MP Caroline Lucas today.
Commenting ahead of an Environmental Audit Committee hearing tomorrow in which the Department for Environmental, Farming and Rural Affairs Minister, Lord Henley, will be grilled on the UK's failure to reduce pollution and adhere to EU air quality regulations, Caroline said:
"Thanks to the inability of Ministers to get a grip on the air quality crisis - which could be contributing to as many as 50,000 deaths every year in the UK (2) - we are now in direct breach of the EU's air quality laws and face expensive legal action from the European Commission.
"Despite significant new evidence of the scale of the health risk from poor air quality and the impact of invisible particles of nitrogen dioxide (3), the Government has done very little to communicate the risk to the public.
"And the fact that it has been forced to apply for more time to meet its EU deadlines indicates a total policy failure.
"In Brighton and Hove, home to my constituency, standards for nitrogen dioxide are regularly exceeded at 20 sites across the city - with much of the pollution being caused by traffic.
"Yet Defra's draft nitrogen dioxide action plan suggests that my constituents will have to wait until 2025 before the UK meets the nitrogen dioxide targets - and suggests few new measures to try to achieve this.
"Instead of trying to water down the current EU laws and wasting money on short term cosmetic fixes, such as sticking pollution to the roads or cleaning the areas around air quality monitors - as we have seen in London, for example - the Government should be creating an urgent cross departmental strategy to reduce pollution.
"We also need to see far more alignment between climate change policy and action on air quality, in order to maximise ‘win-win' benefits and minimise any potential conflicts between the two areas.
"On the 55th anniversary of the Clean Air Act, the Government must stop shirking its responsibilities and come up with a coherent strategy to tackle this public health crisis."
ENDS
1) The Healthy Air Campaign, to be launched today in Westminster, is supported by a coalition of NGOs working in the health and environment fields. The coalition includes Campaign for Better Transport, Clean Air in London, ClientEarth, Environmental Protection UK, Friends of The Earth, Living Streets, Sustrans and is being advised by Professor Frank Kelly, Kings College London and The University of the West of England Air Quality Management Resource Centre.
3) At a recent inquiry into air quality by the Environmental Audit Committee, Professor Frank Kelly of the Environmental Research Group at King's College London warned: "We have this new problem that we cannot see: it is tiny particles of nitrogen dioxide."
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