Air Quality: London

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

Monday 3rd July 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, I too congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Borwick, on achieving this debate. It has been an excellent debate with lots of interesting comments and statements.

I start by paying tribute to Simon Birkett, who runs Clean Air in London. He has kept air pollution in the public eye and produced a mass of statistics over many years. If we are to have a sensible debate about air pollution, we have to have the right data. Simon has recently produced what I think he calls a Birkett app. If you have the right type of phone, you can look at the Birkett IndexTM—I suppose that means trade mark—which gives the air pollution levels and the percentage of deaths attributable to PM 2.5 in local authorities and regions of the UK. Simon looks at the average over 10 years or so of deaths attributed to different public health risks. Smoking comes top with 80,000 in England. Air pollution comes second with 29,000 in the UK, so it is not totally comparable. Alcoholism accounts for 15,000 to 22,000 deaths, obesity 9,000 and road traffic accidents just under 2,000. It is important for people to understand the comparators and where the data have come from if we are to have a proper debate.

All the arguments focus on the need to reduce traffic, particularly in London. It is interesting to note that a lot of noble Lords have talked about ways to reduce other people’s traffic so that they can get through quicker, which is a natural reaction. However, we have to ask ourselves whether we have the right to drive in London where and when we like, probably at minimum cost to ourselves. The noble Lord, Lord Higgins, talked about roadworks. However, I think that some of those around Parliament recently have been caused by the utility companies, which are a bit of a law unto themselves.

As many noble Lords know, I am a cyclist. Cyclists have come in for a bit of a bashing tonight from a number of noble Lords. The noble Lord, Lord Higgins, talked about cycling in The Hague. I have cycled in The Hague and it is very nice. There are some cycle lanes and places where you can feel safe. However, one of the things about The Hague is that there is not much traffic around, and that must make it a great deal safer. I cycled across Paris a couple of weeks ago between the Gare du Nord and the Gare du Midi. There is a segregated cycle lane most of the way, very like the cycle lanes here. However, as I think the noble Lord, Lord Higgins, correctly said, the law is different on the continent. If a cyclist gets hit by a vehicle, I think that the driver of the vehicle is already at least 50% liable before the circumstances are investigated. A long time ago in your Lordships’ House, I suggested that we should change the law here. I was given a pretty rough time by some of the Law Lords, who said that would mean that somebody was guilty before they were proved innocent, or the other way round. But it has contributed to the antipathy, which is often there, between cyclists and motorists. It would be much better if there were no antipathy and everybody behaved with respect to other road users. One of the cycling groups I am involved in is starting a campaign to persuade cars to keep at least a metre and a half clear of cyclists on main roads. In London that is of course impossible, because there is too much congestion. However, we have to look at all the types of traffic here. Buses have come in for a lot of abuse today too. Trains have not been abused yet—I will talk about them in a minute.

In the rush hour, that cycle lane along the embankment is very full and congested; I sometimes feel in danger going down it, while at other parts of the day it is less congested, as are the buses and the roads. However, the benefits of cycling start and finish with people not feeling frightened on a bicycle, and the segregation achieves that. They made a mess of the cycle lanes through the Royal Parks, which is one of the reasons why there has been a delay in Great George Street; the Royal Parks bit of the cycle lane was about two years late, whatever you think about it, and that has caused a lot of problems. It is the same with buses; if we had electric buses, people would use them. The concentration of people you can get in a train, a bus or a cycle lane is rather higher than you can get in one car. I therefore come back to the question: should we not restrict people’s ability to drive their own cars around London and other cities?

Nobody has criticised white vans or trucks yet, but maybe some of my colleagues will do that in winding up. They also cause quite a lot of pollution. I declare an interest as chairman of the Rail Freight Group. We are trying quite hard to get more freight on the rails into city centres. Sometimes it comes in passenger trains, sometimes in roll cages—such as supermarkets have delivered—or in the guards’ vans of trains; there are various examples of that, including crabs and lobsters from Penzance. However, where do you transfer the freight from the train into, hopefully, an electric vehicle or possibly even for cycle delivery for the last few miles into the centre of London? That would create a large reduction in emissions, but there needs to be somewhere to transfer the freight, such as a consolidation centre. The cost of land around the mainline stations is high, and that challenge has not yet been addressed.

The last aspect is the building sector. There are concrete mixing plants, which everybody sees around London and other big cities; there is a big one just outside St Pancras station, which supplies a large amount of concrete buildings in London—it might even supply HS2, if it gets built from Euston. The materials come in by rail—that is quite environmentally friendly—but then you have big concrete trucks going around London. They are diesels, and generally pretty efficient, but it is difficult to know how that could be transferred to electric in the short term anyway. But the biggest problem we have is in the link between the policies and the planning, which is a problem in London and many other places.

I will give an example. We have talked about the ultra-low emission zones in London, we have plans to ban older HGVs from London, which is probably a good thing, and there is the transport strategy. However, while the transport strategy acknowledges the future needs of housing and infrastructure development—which means all these building materials—in over 200 pages it includes not a single reference to air quality and the congestion benefits of rail freight. That seems a bit odd.

The last point relating to this issue is that there are many little concrete batching plants around Greater London. The railway delivers the aggregate and sometimes the cement as well, and it is mixed on site and delivered locally, but there are more and more cases, including in Stratford and Bow in east London, where local authorities allow residential developments next door to these plants. The residents then obviously complain about the noise and dust, and they want them closed down. We either have these little terminals around London and city centres that can receive the materials by rail from the batching plants, which make the asphalt and so on, or they are brought in from 50 or 100 miles away by truck. It is a planning and policy issue, and I hope that when the Minister responds, he will say that he will look at it again. I hope that we can have a meeting about it later because it is quite a serious problem. There are these lovely terminals, which have been there for years—working 24/7, as they have to—and then people build a house or a block of flats next door to them and the residents complain and want to restrict the opening hours of the works.

I have very much enjoyed listening to and participating in this debate, and I look forward to the noble Lord’s answers.