Artificial Light and Noise: Effects on Human Health (Science and Technology Committee Report)

Baroness Neuberger Excerpts

Thursday 9th May 2024 Grand Committee

[Baroness Neuberger (CB)]

My Lords, the whole idea behind the work of the committee that led to this report was that we might be able to point to valuable public health interventions to improve quality of life and reduce the pressures on the NHS in the UK. We urge the Government to reconsider their policy on light and noise pollution and to take these issues more seriously; every speaker so far has said precisely that. The noble Baroness, Lady Brown, has already made the case very powerfully. I pay tribute to her as a brilliant chair of the committee, to our clerk, Matthew Manning, to our policy adviser, Thomas Hornigold and, of course, to our special adviser, Professor Russell Foster.

I must declare my interest as chair of the University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust because I had to send my apologies for a meeting this afternoon in order to attend this debate today. When I did, the chairman of that committee, who is a very distinguished doctor, wrote back and said, “Of course. It’s really important”. We all want less light at night and less unwelcome noise; he just made the point that it is really important. This matter concerns absolutely everybody.

It is for that reason that I find the Government’s response so very disappointing. There is real public interest here. As the noble Baroness, Lady Brown, said, we had a huge response to this report, much more than we normally do to a Select Committee report. People mind about this, and we should take it seriously. We know that noise pollution is detrimental to human health and well-being. We heard quite a lot of the data. We heard good evidence on annoyance and sleep disturbance relating to cardiovascular disease—that is, heart attacks in relation to road traffic noise—about which the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, said something. There is also some evidence on metabolic impacts, in particular diabetes.

We have heard about the estimate from the World Health Organization and the European Environment Agency back in 2018 that more than 100 million people were exposed to harmful levels of environmental noise pollution. People are saying that there are an estimated 48,000 new cases of heart disease and 12,000 premature deaths every year in Europe, and so on. We know quite a lot about the data—although, as the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, said, we could probably know a great deal more.

I add to that; this is really important. Based on new research, the World Health Organization has concluded that the negative health effects caused by prolonged exposure to environmental noise are likely to occur at much lower noise level thresholds than previously thought. This implies that better management of noise generally would considerably benefit the UK population. It goes precisely to the point about the number of days off taken for ill health because of the stress caused by these noise problems. We know that people mind about it.

I could go on about this for a long time but I shall not because I have a specific question for the Minister. We were told that noise pollution issues span government departments. Better interdepartmental co-ordination is clearly warranted, therefore, but the Government did not accept our recommendation for an expert advisory group on noise pollution—as there is for air pollution—despite witnesses to the committee making it clear that there was no one place to go with new and emerging evidence of harms. In their response, the Government simply spelled out the good work led by Defra that is already going on with the collaboration of UKHSA and others, to which the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, referred. We commended that work but, if the effects of noise pollution are as great as the World Health Organization and the UK Health Security Agency suggest, what is going on now is simply inadequate. I hope that the Minister will be able to give us some explanation as to why the eminently sensible recommendation for an expert advisory group was rejected. Given the evidence, that decision seems somewhat perverse.

As the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Jones, mentioned, the Government argued that we need flexibility. They said:

“Flexibility must be maintained to draw in the most appropriate expertise to individual areas of research, rather than relying on a group of individuals to embody all necessary knowledge across the board”.


Of course that is the case—it is obvious—but that might equally be true about air pollution. An expert advisory group does not have all the knowledge at its fingertips; it has people on it who know whom to go to in order to get the material they want. It was seriously perverse to turn down the recommendation on that basis. I hope that the Minister will be able to give us some explanation.

I could go on but I shall not. I want simply to add two other things. We know that light pollution is much more difficult to measure at the moment. We cannot calculate a burden of disease in the same way as we can for noise pollution—probably because of a lack of data, which has been referred to on all sides of the Committee—but it is interesting that, in Japan, a series of longitudinal studies have measured the light in people’s environments. We lack that in the UK, so it seems absolutely essential for us to say now that we will start to undertake those sorts of studies. The UK Health Security Agency is doing great work in this area but it needs to go further.

If you talk to hospital patients and staff who work in hospitals at night, they will tell you all about exposure to light and how incredibly disturbing it is. People who have been in hospital for a long period—we have rather a lot of them at UCLH—will tell you that the worst thing once they come out is not the general convalescence but trying to get back their sleep patterns, which have been disturbed over a long period because of exposure to light. We need light in hospitals but we could do better there, too. The Government need to take the issue of light more seriously and say more about it. They need to give us a really good explanation for why they did not accept our recommendation for an expert advisory group.

Lastly, the Government already have in UKHSA a team of experts on circadian rhythms and the impacts of light on health, but we need to see this as a single point for evidence gathering and co-opting external expertise. I would argue that, as well as having an expert advisory group on noise, the Government should think about having an expert advisory group on light.