Air and Water Pollution: Impact

Lord Strasburger Excerpts

Thursday 26th October 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Strasburger (LD)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lady Miller for giving us the opportunity to debate these important matters. I am going to focus on air pollution, and specifically on nitrogen dioxide’s important role in the great harm being caused to our citizens by polluted air. I also have an important question for the Government and I am hoping that the Minister will be able to explain something in his reply that has been puzzling me for a while.

Here are the headlines about the effects of nitrogen dioxide, some of which have already been mentioned in this debate. This silent killer is one of the main contributors to the 40,000 deaths which occur prematurely every year through strokes, heart disease and diabetes. It causes asthma in otherwise healthy children, and negatively impacts children’s development; it stunts their lung growth, starting somewhat horrifically in the womb.

In 2012, the World Health Organization moved nitrogen dioxide to its highest classification of the causes of cancer, alongside arsenic and mustard gas. It definitely causes lung cancer and probably also causes bladder cancer. As we have heard, the Royal College of Physicians estimates that the health cost to the UK is £20 billion a year. If that cash cost, that death rate and that serious damage to our children’s future were being caused by something like terrorism, badly formulated medicine or food poisoning, the Government would act with great urgency, and rightly so.

Here is the puzzle: why did the Government waste £370,000 of taxpayers’ money trying in vain to repel court action whose only purpose was to make them do something? They have not even taken legal action against Volkswagen over its cheating on diesel emissions tests, despite cases being brought across the globe. Why did they spend a large amount of money on trying to avoid having to take steps to make us healthier when it could have been spent on making us healthier? It is bewildering.

More than half of nitrogen dioxide pollution is caused by road transport and about 40% of that is belched out by diesel cars. Surprisingly, diesel cars are much more polluting than HGVs and buses, partly because larger vehicles are subject to much stricter testing. Diesel cars pump out two and a half times the nitrous oxides emitted by HGVs per kilometre, and 10 times as much per litre of fuel. To be fair, there has been some action from the Government on this, but it has been comically unambitious. They came up with a ban on sales of new petrol and diesel-powered cars from 2040, which is 23 years away. This is the Government’s idea of a quick win.

Other European countries have been much more challenging to car manufacturers, showing that they are in a hurry to dramatically reduce this scandalous annual death toll. Several have set their deadlines to 2025, and our Government should be doing the same or better. They should also be devising a targeted scrappage scheme to get rid of the diesel cars that are already on our roads spewing out toxic pollutants many times over the legal limit. I would like to put in a word here for the much maligned European Union. Without their many sensible directives on these issues, we would not have any standards for our Government to brazenly flout. We must ensure that those standards are preserved or improved if Brexit were to actually happen.

My home city of Bath is one of the 29 cities that are deemed to be seriously in breach of the legal limits on air pollution. Our World Heritage City is surrounded by hills and has chronic congestion and pollution. House prices in the centre are astronomic, which means that many people have to live outside the city and commute in to town, and many do so by car. The school run is a problem in Bath and many parents do not realise that by driving to school, they are contributing to the pollution that is poisoning their own children.

The current Conservative administration have, like the Government, done virtually nothing about it. Fortunately my Liberal Democrat colleagues in Bath are determined to tackle our city’s problems when they win back control of the council in 2019. They really mean business and I am confident that they will succeed in making Bath the healthiest city in the country in terms of its air.

My final point is positive and hopeful. There is an opportunity here for the UK to lead the world in a technological transport revolution. We have specialist skills in battery technology and smart grid technology development, along with plans to be a leader in electric vehicles. If we put our minds to it, we can secure a significant share of the estimated $1.5 trillion of revenue expected to be generated by 2030 in these new markets.