Clean Air (Human Rights) Bill [HL]

Baroness Brinton Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 8th July 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Brinton (LD) [V]]

My Lords, I declare my interest as a vice-president of the Local Government Association. I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, on her excellent Private Member’s Bill and her many years of campaigning on this issue. Frankly, the first line of the Bill says it all:

“Everyone has the right to breathe clean air and the Human Rights Act 1998 is to be read as though this were a Convention right.”


In December 2020 a coroner made legal history by ruling that air pollution was one of the causes of death of nine year-old Ella Adoo Kissi-Debrah in 2013, saying that she was exposed to nitrogen dioxide and particulate matter in excess of World Health Organization guidelines, which exacerbated her severe asthma and put her into acute respiratory failure. I pay tribute to Rosamund, Ella’s mother, for her campaign to get that second coroner’s inquest and for her determination to ensure that in future others will not have to suffer and die as Ella did. This Bill is the vehicle to make that happen and I hope the Government will give it support.

Anyone who knows the South Circular Road in London, close to where Ella lived and went to school, knows how bad the air pollution can be there. Those of us with family members with severe asthma or other lung disease know the damage that can be done, especially to children’s lungs. Watching a child with lung problems struggling to breathe is one of the most distressing things that parents have to face, made infinitely worse when you know that air pollution in your local environment is making it worse. I have spoken before of my granddaughter. She was born prematurely with one-third of her lung tissue dead, and she used a ventilator for much of the first three years of her life. She lived just off the South Circular Road but has fairly recently moved away. There has been a noticeable improvement in her breathing and in general she does not get lung infections anything like as often as she used to—but there is a particular way in which small children try to draw in enough air where the diaphragm seems to disappear right up inside their sternum, and one never forgets the cough when they cannot catch their breath, especially after being outdoors on a day when pollution is bad. The frequent stays in hospital when there is an infection affects all the family, and of course there is a consequent effect on the child’s schooling, education and ability to make friends.

In 2016 the Royal College of Physicians alongside the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health published Every Breath We Take, a report that examined the impact of exposure to air pollution across the life course. While the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, said he thought deaths were around 25,000 to 30,000, the report says that around 40,000 premature deaths every year in the UK are attributable to exposure to outdoor air pollution. The health problems resulting from exposure to air pollution have a very high cost to our health services and businesses. In the UK, these costs add up to more than £20 billion every year. People from lower socioeconomic backgrounds tend to live in environments where they are more exposed to air pollution and therefore suffer much more from the effects of exposure to high levels of air pollution.

This is a public health emergency, and the public health response to air pollution should always be about protecting humans and the environment in ways that are socially inclusive and equitable globally and across multiple generations. After the death of Ella, the coroner’s prevention of future deaths report outlined that legally binding targets based on the World Health Organization guidelines would reduce the number of deaths from air pollution in the UK. I therefore ask the Minister whether, following the Government’s current consultation on targets under the Environment Act 2021, they will set ambitious targets to reduce PM2.5 to 10 micrograms per cubic metre by 2030, with the ultimate objective of reducing annual mean concentration to five micrograms per cubic metre in line with the WHO air quality guideline values published last year.

Above all, can the Government please lead from the front? Many parts of our public sector need to be involved if we are going to make this happen, including local government and primary care as well as our hospitals and, most importantly, those involved in the environment so that we can reduce the damage that this pollution is doing to many people in this country.