Children’s Health: Vehicle Emissions

Baroness Blackstone Excerpts

Tuesday 11th June 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Blackstone (Ind Lab)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as the chairman of the board of trustees of the British Lung Foundation. I expect that, in replying to this debate, the Minister will refer to the clean air strategy, published earlier this year. I acknowledge that much of this is a considerable step forward over what went before. However, there now needs to be greater urgency in implementing the government strategy for reducing air pollution, particularly those parts which affect children. I would like to hear from the Minister the Government’s timetable for making progress on preventing further damage to our children. We cannot allow more premature deaths as a result of air pollution, whether through lung and heart disease, stroke or cancer. Progress must be rapid. The damage being done is horrendous: around one in three children in the UK is growing up in areas with unsafe levels of air pollution.

I reinforce what the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, has said. Toxic air disproportionately affects children from the moment they are conceived and through their early lives as their bodies grow and they go through periods of critical development. Air pollution exposure during pregnancy is linked to low birth weight and premature birth. Children also tend to spend more time outside, where concentrations of air pollution from traffic are generally higher. As the noble Earl just said, when small children are walking or in a pushchair, they are often at the height of vehicle exhausts, meaning that they breathe in higher concentrations of pollutants. Breathing polluted air can cause irreversible damage to children’s growing lungs. There is increasing evidence that air pollution not only aggravates asthma in children but causes it.

Air pollution worsens existing health inequalities. People living in the poorest areas are often the most exposed to pollution, thus reinforcing unequal health outcomes. It also contributes to health inequalities later in life. Children living in highly polluted areas are four times more likely to have reduced lung function in adulthood, leaving them with lifelong health challenges. Some 1.1 million children—one in 11—are receiving treatment for asthma. For these children, exposure to pollution increases their risk of an attack, which can be deadly.

The environment Bill is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to adopt the best standards to protect the public’s health by including legally binding targets for fine particulate matter in line with the limit recommended by the WHO. The current UK legal limit for PM2.5 is more than twice as high as that recommended by the WHO. Will the Government adopt the WHO’s limit into UK law, with a commitment to these standards to be met by 2030? This would guarantee a legislative framework based on the highest health standards and clear, legally binding targets to reduce pollution. Anything less than this would be a lost opportunity. We cannot wait until 2040 to implement this target. Many areas in the UK also experience illegal levels of nitrogen dioxide. Given that 37 out of 43 areas still have illegal levels of NO₂, it is critical to make changes so that we can comply with the legal limit as soon as possible. Will the Minister explain how this compliance will be enforced?

I hope that the Minister will agree that the rapid implementation of clean air zones across the UK’s most polluted areas needs to take place as soon as possible. They should restrict the use of the dirtiest vehicles, including private cars. As I am sure he knows, Defra’s own research shows that the best and quickest way to reduce polluting vehicles on our roads, and thus protect children from their harmful emissions, is the implementation of class D charging clean air zones right across the UK. This must be accompanied by the provision of clean public transport—not just private cars—and active travel, to reduce vehicle use. Will the Government provide more support for the implementation of such zones and more funding for clean public transport and active travel than they have done so far?

Finally, I turn to schools. With over 2,000 schools in areas with toxic air, as the noble Earl has already said, it is clear that a national comprehensive plan to protect children as they travel to and while they are at school is urgently needed. It should include comprehensive air quality audits of schools, nurseries and playgrounds in known pollution hotspots, to identify those affected by harmful levels of air pollution. It should also involve the absolute banning of new schools, nurseries and playgrounds in pollution hotspots. We need to introduce traffic exclusion zones around existing schools to help reduce and limit children’s exposure and to promote walking, cycling and public transport for journeys to and from school.

I hope the Minister will agree to the national rollout of tailored interventions around schools. Without changes of the kind that I have been describing—and to which the two speakers before me have also alluded—I am afraid to say that we will go on damaging our children’s lives and in some places, regrettably, killing them.

Air Quality: London

Baroness Blackstone Excerpts

Monday 3rd July 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Blackstone (Lab)]

My Lords, I must declare an interest: I have just recently become chairman of the British Lung Foundation, of whose board of trustees the noble Lord, Lord Borwick, was a member for a long time. Since that charity has done a great deal of valuable work in trying to promote better air quality not only in London but in the UK generally, I thought it right that on my third day as chair of the trust I should speak on this subject, although I am no expert on it.

I want to begin by discussing the public health dimensions of the crisis that we face in air quality in our big cities, especially in London. No one can any longer be complacent about this and assume that it is a problem faced only by cities such as Delhi, Beijing or Shanghai. I will not go into all the details of the scientific evidence—the noble Lord provided the House with an excellent summary of these issues—but want to pick up one point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Valentine, in mentioning the EU. The EU has done an extraordinarily important job in tackling how we measure pollution in our cities as well as producing a scheme to try to regulate it.

It is a sad reflection of the situation here that the people of London are exposed to pollution which far exceeds EU limits. Around an eighth of the total area of London is above the legal limit for nitrogen dioxide. According to the WHO’s definition of safe levels of particulate matter, air in 90% of the city is considered toxic to breathe. Moreover, Defra’s own modelling shows that not just London but as many as 40 urban areas in the UK will have toxic and illegal air by 2020. This crisis urgently needs to be dealt with.

The implications for public health are enormous. First, air pollution contributes to the development of lung conditions. Incidentally, lung disease is already the UK’s third-largest killer after cardiovascular disease and cancer. Too few of us are aware of this fact. Toxic air is a major contributor to developing a lung condition. Children are particularly vulnerable as their lungs are still developing, and those growing up in high-pollution areas are four times more likely to have poor lung development. Many suffer from chronic asthma, and their lungs may well be damaged for the rest of their lives. How can we expose vulnerable children to suffering of this sort which is wholly preventable? Moreover, those children and adults in deprived areas—as the noble Lord, Lord Borwick, said—are more likely to be exposed to poor-quality air.

Secondly, toxic air exacerbates the suffering of those who already have a lung condition. The symptoms of those with COPD—which, again, the noble Lord referred to; an extremely unpleasant long-term chronic disease—or asthma become worse, sometimes leading to hospitalisation, just because they breathed air outside. Why should they spend their lives inside? Those with cardiovascular disease are also at risk of suffering from coronary attacks which can lead to hospitalisation due to exposure to high levels of traffic-related air pollution. The Department of Health and NHS England say that public health and the prevention of disease is a high priority. Here we have an area of ill-health that is preventable, yet the Government have done far too little about it.

The cost of this is enormous. Estimates suggest that around 40,000 deaths per annum across the country are attributable to toxic air, and in London it contributes to 9,400 early deaths per annum. The direct costs to the NHS in London are extremely high, given the several thousand hospital admissions caused by air pollution every year. The overall economic cost could be as high as £3.7 billion, according to a recent study by King’s College London.

I turn now to the challenge this poses for the Government and will ask the Minister a number of questions. Before doing so, I salute the work of Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, for deciding to attach very high priority to improving air quality. He has already announced a number of measures for tackling the problem. However, he cannot do this alone. The Government must play their part and not simply pass on responsibility to local authorities, either in London or elsewhere in the UK. As my noble friend Lord Whitty said, solutions require national as well as local policies.

My first question is: why were there no provisions for a new clean air Act in the Queen’s Speech? We heard a little about the history of the earlier Clean Air Act and I think it was in the Conservatives’ manifesto, so why are the Government going through a two-year Parliament with no such Bill? This is urgent. Moreover, it would attract cross-party agreement. I hope the Minister will not say when he replies that there is no room for anything other than Brexit-related legislation, when we are told that currently the Government are struggling to find enough business to fill parliamentary time.

A clean air Act should help to promote greater understanding of the need for clean transport, including more walking and cycling. The noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, was a bit unfair to cyclists. I accept that there are some dangerous cyclists, but many are far from dangerous and are doing the right thing in cycling to work or to meet friends rather than getting in their cars. While I am attacking the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, he was also a bit hard on Gordon Brown—the “socialist politician”, as he described him. It is fair to say that, when government advice was given that it would be better to buy a diesel car rather than a petrol car, that was based on what was the scientific consensus at the time. I am sure he regrets that now, as many other people do who were involved in giving that advice, but the Prime Minister alone cannot be taken to task for it.

A clean air Act ought also to establish new legal limits on pollution, based on the WHO’s standards. It could also introduce a targeted diesel scrappage scheme—to which the noble Lord, Lord Borwick, and my noble friend Lord Whitty already referred—to help local authorities get the most-polluting vehicles off the road. What do the Government plan to do in this respect? This seems a really important, burning issue. There is also a need for new fiscal incentives. Vehicle excise duty and company car tax should be further adjusted to encourage people to purchase the lowest-polluting vehicles, to deal with all three of the main sources of pollution: CO₂, NO₂ and PM emissions. Following the Vauxhall scandal, already referred to, the regulation of vehicle manufacture may also need some tightening up. Electric cars surely need to be introduced more quickly, with greatly increased numbers of charging points than exist at present. Again, I would be grateful if the Minister could address these issues in his reply.

Finally, we need more charging clean air zones or ultra clean air zones, especially around schools. Many children in London go to schools massively affected by pollution because they are located on main roads. Should we not introduce fines for those who selfishly run their car engines when they are stationary—in all clean air zones but especially outside schools?

There will not be enormous public resistance to any changes. According to a survey commissioned by London Councils, 76% of Londoners believe that tackling air pollution should be a priority, and nearly half of them said that poor air quality had affected their health. Many also said they would accept that changes are required in their own behaviour in order to improve the air that we breathe. Please will the Government get on with it—research, yes, but some action as well—and move on from the rather pathetic response they gave to the High Court’s ruling that they should publish a plan on how they will deal with non-compliance with EU laws on air quality? Will they confirm that, after Brexit, UK courts will be able to enforce the relevant legislation?

As a Londoner, I am proud of this great city, but I do not want to be ashamed of it in respect of this most basic of human rights: that the air we breathe should be clean.

Higher Education (Basic Amount) (England) Regulations 2010

Baroness Blackstone Excerpts

Tuesday 14th December 2010 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Shephard of Northwold]

Who does the noble Baroness think is responsible for the situation that we are in? It is her party, the party opposite.

[Baroness Blackstone]

I declare an interest as vice-chancellor of the University of Greenwich. Like my noble friend Lord Giddens, I have worked in other higher education institutions, and at one time, as many noble Lords know—I shall return to this as one or two things have been said about the earlier introduction of fees—I was the Minister responsible for post-16 education.

I support my noble friend Lord Triesman in this amendment. I do so not in a spirit of outrage; I am not outraged—I am disappointed, saddened and worried. There is a real danger that we are walking into a trap, which we have made for ourselves and which we will later regret. It is important when making fundamental changes of this kind that we do so in a considered way, and my noble friend’s amendment asks that we should give more consideration to these serious issues.

I do not want to repeat everything that has been said before, nor to go into a great deal of detail, but I want to focus on three or four of what I consider to be the fundamental points before we go down this route. There are many issues of detail where I believe that the proposals are in fact flawed, but those are for another time.

First, I shall focus on what a number of other speakers have already touched on—the abolition of all funding for teaching in the arts, humanities and social sciences. The value of these subjects is enormous. In any civilised society, we invest time, effort and money in ensuring that our young people become well educated in these subjects. This is an investment, not a subsidy. One of the things that I found regrettable in the report of the noble Lord, Lord Browne of Madingley, was that he referred to higher education in terms of a subsidy. It is in fact an investment in our futures, our economy, our society, our well-being and the quality of our lives, and these subjects are fundamental to all that.

I cannot tell noble Lords how much misery and despair the decision to stop all teaching funding in these subjects has caused among academics right across the country and among students, both undergraduate and postgraduate. No country in the world has stopped public funding for a major part of the work that is done in teaching in its public universities, and I deeply regret that it looks, unless we can make a different decision today, as though this country will be the first to do so.

On the question of the cut in the teaching grant from £3.5 billion to only £0.7 billion, I am perfectly aware of the need to tighten our belts and to reduce public expenditure but no other part of the public sector—no other institution in receipt of public funding—has been asked to cut by 80 per cent. Why should we be asking our universities to do this?

My second point has not been given enough consideration so far today—the enormous cost of the tuition loan scheme when these new fees are introduced. Instead of fee loans for a three-year degree at less than £10,000 under the present system, the Government will have to borrow to fund loans of up to £27,000 per student. That will mean billions of extra borrowing by the Government because many universities are going to charge the full amount, as my noble friend Lord Triesman has already said, and because the Government have seriously underestimated the levels of repayment that are likely to be achieved. The noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, referred to the fact that the RAB costs will be much higher than the Government have claimed.

We are thus faced with the absurdity that the taxpayer will end up by paying more for the new system than for the present one. Every reputable think tank that has looked at this comes to the same conclusion, so it is not just my view; it is the view of those who have carried out careful analyses, in an objective way, of what is being proposed.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Patten of Barnes]

My Lords, I disclose an interest as the Chancellor of the university of which Jesus College is a distinguished part. However, on this occasion, I am afraid that I do not agree with Jesus, and for reasons which have made me for 20 years a passionate believer in a bigger contribution by students to their education. I say with respect to the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, that his speech was a triumph of hope over experience because for years, under Governments of both political persuasions, and one that I recall of no political persuasion whatever, we have spent substantially less on higher education as a proportion of GDP than almost all our competitors, and certainly less than the OECD average. The latest OECD comparisons, published in 2010, show that in 2007—the latest authorised figures—we spent 1.2 per cent to 1.3 per cent of our GDP on higher education. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Giddens, that British taxpayers spent less on it than did American taxpayers. We also spent less than the OECD average, and considerably less than the United States, which spent 3.1 per cent of GDP on higher education—and that was before the cuts of £1 billion which were introduced by the former Lord President. I am sorry that he is not in his place today to explain to us exactly what he intended when he asked the noble Lord, Lord Browne, to undertake his review of tuition fees.

There are only four ways in which you can get money for higher education. You can get it through research income, endowments—we know very well that only three universities in Europe would get into the top 150 in the United States in terms of the size of their endowments—the taxpayer or tuition fees. We know from the experience of the past 10, 20, 30 or 40 years that the taxpayer will not provide the money, so the only revenue stream that is left is the student. I totally agree not with the spiritual authority of the right reverend Prelate, but with almost as great a spiritual authority—I agree with what Mr Blair had to say about the social equity of students making a contribution to what will make such an impact on their lifetime earnings. It seems to me a wholly defensible proposition.

[Baroness Blackstone]

My Lords, does the noble Lord agree that what the former Prime Minister Tony Blair said was that it should be a contribution? He used the words himself. He did not say, and never did, that students should pay the whole of the cost of their higher education.

[Lord Patten of Barnes]

No, as I shall explain in a moment, they will not be doing that in the case of the university that I know best. I remind the noble Baroness that the former Prime Minister wanted to introduce fees in 2004, not of £3,000 but of £5,000. He could not get that through the House of Commons largely because of the views of his honourable friends in the Parliamentary Labour Party, so let us not rewrite history. I suggest that the noble Baroness should refresh her memory by reading Mr Blair’s autobiography.

My Liberal Democrat noble friends have been teased about changing their mind. As my noble friend Lady Sharp pointed out, there are very strong reasons for their change of mind. It was slightly ironic that in his flirtation with the Liberal Democrats yesterday, the leader of the Labour Party, in a less than bravura performance, offered them the opportunity of talks with Liam Byrne. That must have set their pulses racing with excitement. But what makes it particularly ironic is that it is the same Mr Byrne who, as my noble friend Lady Shephard pointed out, gave the game away and told us after the election that there was no money left—zilch. I am not sure that it is the right moment to follow the right reverend Prelate in questioning why public debt is so terrific but private debt is such a bad thing. At some stage we could seek the authority of the New Testament on that proposition, but perhaps this is not the right moment.

When we consider changes to what one has promised the electorate, I seem to recall what happened in January 2004, after the then Labour Government had changed their position. When asked,

“Is the party open to the charge that it has broken a manifesto commitment?”,

Mr Alan Johnson replied yes. When asked:

“Is that crime of a century for a government to do?”,

he replied no. If one is to believe what is said about the public accounts under Labour, Mr Johnson did not have the excuse then of the bank having been broken.

I want to make a couple of points about the proposals themselves, not going any further into the seam of intellectual integrity which has underpinned the Labour Party’s position. I have a couple of questions. First, I think that all of us want to see an increase in the endowments for our universities, which are well behind our American competitors in that regard, as the noble Lord, Lord Giddens, pointed out. Can we be sure that the Government will look at how they can encourage philanthropic donations in the future, not just to charities in general but to our university sector in particular because it is of considerable significance?

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Henley]

My Lords, it is wonderful to be so welcome. I noticed the declaration of interests that the noble Lord, Lord Triesman, made at the beginning of his somewhat lengthy speech, although it was none the worse for that. My noble friend Lady Shephard described him as having a silky tongue. I had better declare another interest in that I was one of those higher education Ministers who saw him, and I declare the interest that I greatly enjoyed the lunch that he gave me some 13 or so years ago. I am not sure that I ever declared it at the time but it was a very useful meeting, as he explained to me just how many members of his union were in both Houses. I think he claimed that he had more than any other trade union leader in the history of trade union leaders having members in this House.

I listened with interest to the somewhat lengthy speech of the noble Lord, Lord Triesman, but I heard no coherent argument in it whatever. It was a mere rant, with no solution put forward by the party that got us into the mess that my noble friend Lady Shephard described. He claims that there is no evidence and that there was no consultation, but does he not think that the report produced by the noble Lord, Lord Browne, and commissioned by the Government of whom he has been a member, provided just that? In that report there is evidence, and in the production of that report there was a great deal of consultation.

A great number of points have been made during this debate and I want to deal with some of them in order to knock the myths that are growing up. The first one—addressed, first, by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Lincoln but brought back to us again and again—is the idea that the poorest will be deterred. The right reverend Prelate referred to the removal of the education maintenance allowance for 17 and 18 year-olds. I understand that the removal of the EMA was examined in a report by the party opposite when it was in government. The report showed that some 90 per cent of the money was being wasted, and it was not encouraging the children involved to stay on at school, as they would have stayed on anyway. I think that my right honourable friend did exactly the right thing in suggesting that that money could be moved and made better use of.

In terms of the poorest being deterred, many of us made that argument when student fees were introduced. It started, as the noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone, said, in 1998 and was then enhanced by the 2004 Act. On both occasions we saw an increase in those from less well-off homes going into higher education, and I do not see any reason why that should not happen again. We will certainly continue to examine what happens after these changes come into force.

The next point—put forward by the noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone, and the noble Lord, Lord Krebs—is that our decision to increase the upper cap to £9,000 is purely a political choice and that we have made it for no other reason than we want to save money. I must make it clear that in their Pre-Budget Report of 2009 the previous Government identified some £600 million of cuts to higher education and science to be made by 2012-13. The department responsible for universities, BIS, was not protected in Labour’s public expenditure plans, so it is hard to see what protection a Labour Government would have produced over the spending review period if they had not been able to cut departments’ budgets by some 25 per cent, which is exactly what we have done.

That deficit exists—we inherited it—and the Government are responsible for the interests of all taxpayers in meeting it. At a time of real financial hardship, we believe it is right to make cuts across public spending, but we do not believe that it is right to ask those on low incomes to pay additional taxes to prop up an unaffordable university funding system from which they do not benefit directly. Obviously there is a benefit to all of society—I accept that—but there is a greater benefit for the individuals going to university and I do not think that we can get away from that.

The second point that I want to address is the idea put forward—again, by the noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone—that the new system will not save any money. She quoted the Institute for Fiscal Studies and the Higher Education Policy Institute, which have both questioned whether the policy will save money in the end. I say to the noble Baroness that our proposals contribute directly to paying down the deficit because they replace grants with loans, of which about 70 per cent are expected to be repaid in due course by those on higher earnings. We are reducing the direct funding of universities via the teaching grant—

[Baroness Blackstone]

My Lords—

[Lord Henley]

I shall give way when I have finished this point and then the noble Baroness can spring to her feet. However, it is up to me to decide whether I give way. We are reducing the teaching grant and increasing the loans, and therefore universities’ funding will not be affected.

[Baroness Blackstone]

My Lords, is the Minister aware that HEPI has carried out substantial analytical work which suggests that the Government have been over-optimistic in their assumptions—I do not want to go into all the detail now—about how much of the loans will be repaid? It has come up with a figure much closer to 50 per cent than 70 per cent.

[Lord Henley]

HEPI has done its research based on its assumptions; we have done ours based on our assumptions, and I am confident that our assumptions—