Air and Water Pollution: Impact

Baroness Walmsley Excerpts

Thursday 26th October 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Walmsley (LD)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lady Miller for her inspiring introductory speech. As an asthmatic person who has to come to London every week from the beautiful clean air of my home village in North Wales, I have a personal interest in this topic. As I stand by the roadside outside this building, I can smell the pollution, and it certainly affects my breathing. Unfortunately, I know that this is not a short-term effect, because the Royal College of Physicians tells us that the effects are lifelong and can make us more susceptible to infections and cancer. Indeed, I have noticed that too.

However, I am an adult, and developed as a child in an environment with much cleaner air. On the other hand, the children of today, especially those who live and go to school in deprived urban areas, are growing up and developing in air that is toxic. One in five of London’s primary and secondary schools is in an area of high air pollution, and 85% of those are in areas of greater than average deprivation. There are 950 schools and 1,000 nurseries across Britain close to an illegally polluted road.

However, we should not be concerned just about areas of high pollution. A recent study in the Harvard New England Journal of Medicine concluded that there is no safe level of air pollution and that disadvantaged people have the greatest adverse health effects, so, for reasons of health quality, we need to tackle it urgently.

The lungs are obviously the most susceptible organ. A study in southern California showed a clear link between the risk of developing early school-age asthma and air pollution associated with traffic. Apart from the obvious lung impairment and consequent increased stress on the heart, it is not widely known that air pollution, particularly the microparticulates in diesel fumes, can cross the placental barrier and affect the developing organs, including the foetal brain. This can have a very serious effect on all aspects of brain development, including cognition, and can also affect older people. We are reducing babies’ life chances before they are even born.

Infants are also particularly susceptible because they have a higher metabolic rate than adults and breathe a greater volume of air compared to their size. It is a double whammy: they breathe in more air and are more susceptible to its harmful effects. On top of that, they are often pushed around in buggies which put them exactly at the level of car exhausts. That is why it is particularly important for us to monitor the level of pollution around schools and nurseries and reduce it where necessary. We need to know what the problem is before we can address it.

Schools are usually on main roads, often at intersections, where pollution is greatest because vehicles have to stop and idle. Of course, many parents drive their children to school, although a recent report on air pollution and London schools suggested that this is not a major contributor to air pollution. The same report emphasised the importance to children’s health of physical activity and recommended active ways of getting to school, such as walking or cycling. It calculated that the benefits of the activity outweighed the risk of doing it in polluted air. However, it would obviously be better if the air was clean. I know a doctor who has carefully planned his children’s walking route to school along those lines, making sure that they walk along the less traffic-ridden roads and experience cleaner air.

I am sure that several speakers will recommend ways of reducing pollution in the first place, such as phasing out coal-fired power stations, supporting renewable energy sources, charging drivers of polluting vehicles for entering clean air zones, mandating reduced emissions standards for private cars, removing the dirtiest vehicles from the roads, encouraging electric cars and the charging infrastructure for them and, of course, improving access to public transport. I agree that those prevention measures are really important but, while we are waiting for all these measures to improve the air we breathe, we need to think about mitigation measures.

Our greatest allies in that fight are trees and other green plants. London is one of the greenest major cities in the western world, with many large and wonderful parks and gardens and thousands of street trees. Not for nothing are our public parks called the lungs of London, and the same applies in other British cities. Private gardens play a very big role, too. A consequence of that is the proliferation of beekeepers in London, since the number and variety of forage plants is so great. It is probably this fact that prevents us having even dirtier air in London since, not only do trees absorb carbon dioxide from the air and give out oxygen, helping to mitigate global warming, but many of them are also very good at removing pollutants from the air before transpiring it out again.

I am pleased to say that many big developers are quite aware of the benefits of trees and other greenery around their buildings and infrastructure, and build landscaping and planting into the plans from the start. A good example of that is the new American Embassy in Nine Elms Lane just opposite where I live. They are planting many mature trees, hedges and ornamental grasses around the new building, which will buffer the noise and pollution from the traffic and contribute to the well-being of users of the building and local residents. We need local authority planners to insist that all developers do this, and to plan sufficiently far in advance to allow British growers the time to grow the stock they need in the interests of British biosecurity. All noble Lords will have heard about the many plant diseases that we inadvertently import, so I am sure we would all want to support our own home-grown British industry. Do the Government intend to include the planting of trees and green areas in their plans to meet the legal limits for air pollution? I know there is a plan to plant 1 million trees, but many of them will be in rural areas, which have clean air anyway. They should be in urban areas.

Of course, there are those who believe that our limits are too high anyway, so I urge the Government to keep going, even when current legal limits have been achieved. As members of the European Union, we have signed up to those legal limits, which we have still not achieved everywhere. I disagree with the noble Earl, Lord Caithness: it is not the standards that are wrong, it is the people who try to avoid them, such as VW. So, Brexit or no Brexit, will the Government introduce a new Clean Air Act so that we have new systems in place to achieve the standards to which we have signed up?