Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee, Environmental Audit Committee, Health and Social Care Committee and Transport Committee

Andrew Selous Excerpts

Thursday 22nd March 2018 Westminster Hall

[Neil Parish]

I thank the hon. Lady for her questions and, again, for her co-operation in putting the Joint Committee together. She will not be surprised to know that I very much agree with her points.

On the clean air Act, that is something we need the Government to come forward with, because it would concentrate not only resource but political drive on cleaning up our air. On the World Health Organisation’s targets, we need to be more ambitious than the Government are at the moment. On an environmental protection agency, we need to know more from the Government about how that would come about, how it would take on the role that the European Commission has had, and who could take the Government to court to hold them to account.

The car fleet is an interesting one. I expect that the hon. Lady, like me, has often come through Speaker’s Court and seen interesting vehicles waiting for Secretaries of State. The vehicles are all quite large, and as far as I can see very few have anything hybrid about them, so perhaps the Government could lead by example. It will be interesting to see what they do. This is a serious point, because as we get our new fleet of vehicles across all Departments, we need a series of electric vehicles and hybrids. For some places, all-electric will work. If people have to go longer distances, hybrids are essential. We look forward to working with all the other Select Committees to ensure that we deliver cleaner air.

[Andrew Selous (South West Bedfordshire) (Con)]

I, too, pay tribute—I am sure I do so on behalf of the whole House—to PC Keith Palmer and the other victims of the terrorist attack a year ago today. I thank all the security staff who are on duty today, enabling our democracy to carry on functioning.

Does my hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Neil Parish) agree that the list of illnesses caused by poor air quality is shockingly worrying? It includes, but is not limited to, respiratory illness, heart attack, hypertension, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, asthma, dementia, type 2 diabetes and obesity. It is quite a long list, and the public probably would not suspect that all those illnesses link back to poor air quality.

Does my hon. Friend also agree that car users, who are sometimes seen as the source of the problem, are actually very serious victims? One of the surprising things that we learnt from doing our report was that people who regularly travel in cars in cities are themselves among those worst affected by poor air quality. Parents driving children to school in cities need to understand what the health effects are on them and their children.

Does my hon. Friend share my concern at what is frankly the absence from the pitch of the healthcare sector in a lot of the debate? We need to see a lot more action from Public Health England and from GPs, informing the public about the risks and telling them what to do. If I go into my local surgery, I will see advice on how to reduce smoking, on how to drink less alcohol and on weight reduction, but despite looking very hard I will not find anything to tell me what I can do to avoid poor air quality and how to deal with that issue.

Does my hon. Friend agree that if the health sector and those responsible for public health put that information out in a way that is helpful and useful to the public, that will help to bring about an army of concerned citizens who will demand change, at both local and national level, to deal with the problem?

[Neil Parish]

I thank my hon. Friend for so ably representing the Health and Social Care Committee in our Joint Committee. He raises interesting points about the number of illnesses attributed to poor air quality. Of course, we were suddenly told to drive diesel vehicles because we needed to reduce carbon, ignoring the nitric oxide and the particulates. That is now hugely affecting our health. He talked about what is happening outside our schools and inside our cars—we are being affected by particulates even as we drive along.

My hon. Friend made a particular point about schools, and I think that this issue applies not just in the inner cities but everywhere. I say to parents, “When you come to pick up your children, please don’t leave your cars ticking over outside, with all the levels of pollution that causes.” That is really important across the whole country, not just in the hotspots of very poor air quality.

On the point about Public Health England, we do need much better and much more information about how poor air quality affects our health. That would also raise public awareness of what we are doing as we drive, how we drive and what we drive. It would bring those issues home to people as they make their choices in future.

During the inquiry, my hon. Friend was keen to ensure that our air quality monitoring systems, both in local government and the national systems, work together so that we can collate the figures, to ensure that we get better air quality, and really drill down to find the worst affected areas. Overall, we can all do more to reduce the amount of pollution we create. I thank him for his question.