Air Quality

Jeff Smith Excerpts

Thursday 15th December 2016 Westminster Hall

[Jeff Smith (Manchester, Withington) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Betts. I congratulate the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee on a comprehensive and valuable report on the air quality crisis that we face in this country. I am pleased that the Committee is continuing to take evidence on DEFRA’s plans following the High Court ruling that the Government have comprehensively failed to address the issue.

There is a lot in the report, and I will briefly address a couple of its recommendations on vehicle emissions. The deterioration in the quality and safety of the air we breathe, particularly in cities such as Manchester, is increasingly acknowledged as a public health crisis. We know that air pollution causes 40,000 premature deaths a year, that air pollution is linked to cancer, asthma, strokes and heart disease, and that 3,000 of our schools are on sites with dangerous levels of air pollution.

The report is particularly timely in light of the EU referendum result. There is no doubt that the EU has helped us to address air quality. EU regulations such as the 2008 ambient air quality directive have been important tools for campaigners to hold the Government to account. Just this week, EU Environment Ministers approved a new directive on air pollution that revises targets for member states in line with the Gothenburg protocol. The directive is predicted to halve premature deaths in the EU due to air pollution by 2030, so the EU has a strong track record of action on this issue. Working closely with our EU partners will be critical in the coming years, which is why there is such concern that, following the referendum, we are now at a crossroads. The scale of the challenge is huge.

From speaking to people such as Manchester Friends of the Earth and the British Lung Foundation, I know there is a real fear that leaving the EU could see us return to being the dirty man of Europe, notwithstanding what was said earlier about the repeal Bill. I agree with the Labour environment campaign and ClientEarth that the prospect of leaving the EU reinforces the need for a new clean air Act to bring the EU and World Health Organisation guidelines into UK law to ensure that we do not lose those safeguards in the long term.

The report raises a couple of issues that relate to Manchester. First, I welcome recommendation 9, which calls on the Government to extend new powers and support to councils that are ready to address air quality. Restricting the provision of clean air zones to five cities outside London limits the scope for supporting urban centres such as Manchester to play our part in reducing air pollution.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Dr Thérèse Coffey)]

We are not restricting it. The difference is that the Government are requiring it of those five cities. Any part of the country can introduce a clean air zone if it wishes.

[Jeff Smith]

What we do not get in Manchester is the support and resource to do it, as the other five cities do.

I was told in July 2016 that Greater Manchester was denied funding and support for a clean air zone because of predictions that the city region would not break the EU directive limit. However, it emerged during the recent High Court case that DEFRA originally included Greater Manchester in the list of clean air zones, only to be told by the Treasury that we cannot afford it. Also, DEFRA’s air quality projections for Manchester have been widely discredited because they are based on static car usage and no population growth—in fact, Greater Manchester’s population has grown at double the UK average over the past decade. Despite our fantastic progress on public transport, particularly our Metrolink, 58% of journeys within Greater Manchester are still made by car. Now that DEFRA is having to revisit its air quality strategy, I urge the Minister to think again and support Manchester in implementing a clean air zone.

Secondly, we all got it wrong on diesel vehicles, and the Government now need to take stronger and faster action. The direction of travel across the world is away from diesel cars and towards low-emission vehicles. As has been mentioned, just last week Paris, Mexico City, Madrid and Athens joined Tokyo in moving to ban diesel vehicles from their city centres.

Recommendation 19 calls for a national diesel scrappage scheme, paired with grants for purchasing low-emission vehicles. Funding for new refuelling infrastructure for low-carbon vehicles is welcome, but it is clearly not enough on its own to get high-polluting diesel cars off the road. In Manchester we have taken promising steps to modernise our bus fleet and increase the number of charging locations for electric cars, but we need the Government to show more leadership. It is time for the Government to follow our international partners and take serious action. A scrappage scheme for diesel cars would demonstrate such action, so I repeat the calls made by other Members to reconsider that proposal.

I will not speak for long, but I return to the High Court case brought by the lawyers at ClientEarth. The case exposes the Government’s lack of ambition to address our air pollution crisis. The verdict shows that the Government are committed to scraping by but, following the EU referendum result, that approach will not be enough.

Recommendation 7 sums it up perfectly:

“the Government must accord poor air quality a priority commensurate with the toll on the nation’s health and environment.”

That is absolutely what we need now.