Low Emission Zones

Debate between Nick Smith and Rory Stewart

Wednesday 25th November 2015 Westminster Hall

[Rory Stewart]

That is a very good challenge, which will apply to many of us. We see the same challenge in the installation of broadband and insulating historic buildings, as well as in electric infrastructure, and DEFRA tries to use different mechanisms to address that. We sit on taskforces on housing and infrastructure, which provide good opportunities to raise that point. I absolutely take the point that historic cities are different. They operate differently and it will not always be possible to have a solution for an historic city that can be applied to a new city.

[Nick Smith]

I thank the Minister for accepting my intervention and for his contribution. There seems to be a lot of willingness across the UK to introduce these schemes and he has spoken about introducing cameras and background administrative systems to help implement them, so how will the Government financially help local authorities to implement these good ideas?

[Rory Stewart]

The answer to that, I am afraid, is that we are still completing our consultation on the plan. The plan will be printed by the end of the year and a final answer will be presented to the shadow Minister on exactly that. We have just compiled more than 700 different responses and we are going through them to try to understand what local authorities wish to do in their different towns. We are trying to work out how many projects will involve cameras and how many will involve light goods vehicles, HGVs and taxis. Some will want to invest money in hybrid buses, while others will want to go for electric charging schemes and others will want active traffic management systems to move traffic around in different directions.

The plan, which will be the answer to that, will be scrutinised carefully by the Opposition and also by ClientEarth, the Supreme Court and the European Commission, all of whom will look at it to ensure that they can be confident that we can deliver by 2020. That is the document that we wish to present at the end of this year.

I thank all right hon. and hon. Members for attending. This is a really important issue on a change. We did not know much about nitrogen dioxide until relatively recently: the first scientific evidence on it came out of when the “Six Cities” study in the United States that began on particulate matter and moved on to nitrogen dioxide began to identify correlations between pollution and morbidity. We still do not completely understand the chemical processes and health implications. We know that there is some kind of correlation between these substances and effects on human health and that we have to act to reduce these substances, but this is something that Governments were not really focused on even as recently as five to seven years ago.

Science is changing all the time. New research is coming in and we have doubled our numbers in a lot of these areas. I am very grateful to those who have participated in the debate and we look forward to working with everyone around the table and every local authority and devolved Administration to ensure that we provide what everyone in the United Kingdom wants: that the invisible substance that we breathe and on which we depend and our children’s lungs depend is safe and clean and that British air remains something that we proudly breathe.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered the introduction of low emission zones.