Children’s Health: Vehicle Emissions

Earl of Dundee Excerpts

Tuesday 11th June 2019 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Dundee (Con)]

My Lords, all of us will be very grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, for introducing this important debate. In my remarks today I will briefly look at three aspects: why the health risks to children from harmful vehicle emissions have to be taken seriously; what needs to be done to reduce those risks; and the extent to which certain measures to guarantee their effective delivery ought now to become legally binding within the United Kingdom.

All are endangered by air pollution and harmful vehicle emissions. These undermine good health and threaten lung and heart disease, strokes and cancer. Exposure probably leads to a loss of 15 minutes of life expectancy every day; and it is associated with 40,000 premature deaths each year in the United Kingdom. Public Health England considers that if the next 20 years can witness an efficient reduction in air pollution, this would prevent 50,000 cases of heart disease, 6,500 strokes, 9,000 cases of asthma and 4,000 lung cancers.

Children, of course, are particularly vulnerable. When walking about or in a pushchair, they are often at the level of vehicle exhausts, meaning that they breathe in higher concentrations of pollutants. The latter may cause irreversible damage to their lungs, including aggravating asthma and causing it in the first place.

Around one in three children in the United Kingdom now grows up in an area with unsafe amounts of air pollution. As a result, diminished lung function becomes much more probable in adulthood. Current research also reveals that 2,000 schools and nurseries are in such areas of dangerous levels of air pollution; and that a significant majority of parents are worried about the effect of this on their children’s health.

A number of remedies may be fairly obvious. Traffic exclusion zones should be positioned around schools, nurseries and playgrounds; journeys to and from them ought to be better encouraged through walking, cycling and public transport; and school systems must be more frequently provided in order to measure and monitor air pollution. Does my noble friend the Minister agree that such necessary and protective actions can quite easily be taken straight away? Can he, therefore, tell us by when they will have been efficiently adopted to benefit a majority of all the schools now under threat?

There is also the challenge to manufacture and deploy transport that is both economically viable and environmentally friendly. There may now be a strong case for moving from an overdependence on electricity towards different forms of gas instead. Commonly available is methane, which is combustible, does not produce solid particles in the exhaust and can be obtained from digesters built to dispose of biomass, waste food, grass cuttings and other organic waste. Left to disperse into the atmosphere, methane is bad for the climate, but when combusted the harm is reduced.

Regarding renewable natural energy, there is no scarcity in tropical zones, where many city dwellers are choking from the exhaust emissions of diesel vehicles. Uncomfortable temperatures of 40 to 50 degrees centigrade are common, due to the sun in daytime. An opportunity is available to use excess solar energy to compress air and store it in containers. As with compressing a spring, this air can be released to perform useful work.

A century ago, static steam engines were employed in France—in Nantes and some in Paris—to compress air, which drove the trams along the streets. The same technology can be revived in modern form, using the energy from the sun to compress the air, resulting in a transport system that uses free energy and is also pollution free.

These are only a few examples. Can my noble friend say what steps the Government are taking to inspire innovative business research through which, to a far greater extent, transport may become economically viable and environmentally friendly? Our exports would thereby improve, not least by enabling the United Kingdom to guide reduced harmful vehicle emissions abroad.

The environment Bill also gives us an opportunity to protect children and the most vulnerable by curbing the worst effects of air pollution. Just now it is unclear whether the Bill will include provisions for legally binding limits on air pollution. Can my noble friend, therefore, reassure us that the World Health Organization’s recommended limits for health-harmful concentrations of key air pollutants, indoors and outdoors, will be incorporated in UK law?

A new office for environmental protection has been proposed, yet so far it has been implied that many OEP roles will be appointed by government. Is my noble friend nevertheless able to let us know that this is not the case and that, instead, the OEP will be independent of government and will have robust enforcement powers to deter breaches of legal air pollution limits?

To date, the Government may appear insufficiently ambitious. Their target for ending sales of petrol and diesel is 2040 but, as the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, has just observed, this could be attained much sooner—by 2030, for example. Equally, it might seem that the Government are insufficiently hands-on, and thus overdelegating to local government. An example is their recent response to the monitoring of air pollution. That should certainly start locally yet must form part of an overall and determined strategy to protect children and combat air pollution, comprising a variety of convincing and complementary initiatives led by the Government to the advantage of the United Kingdom and all other countries elsewhere.