Air Quality Strategy

Lord Jackson of Peterborough Excerpts
Monday 24th April 2017

(7 years, 7 months ago)

Commons Chamber
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Andrea Leadsom Portrait Andrea Leadsom
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I was in full agreement with the hon. Gentleman until that last bit. Of course not. I was going to praise the work of Southampton City Council, which has received significant Government funding for its clean air programmes. It is doing a good job and should continue to do so. To be clear, as things stand, clean air zones can be implemented by any local authority. It should therefore be in the interests of all local authorities to do whatever they can to improve air quality for their local communities.

Lord Jackson of Peterborough Portrait Mr Stewart Jackson (Peterborough) (Con)
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Should not the air quality plan be seen in the wider context of the environment and tax changes? Is it not the case that the Government are in a more difficult position than they would be otherwise because of the legacy of the wrong-headed tax changes made by Labour? As a result of the ridiculous tax changes made under Gordon Brown, we more than doubled the number of diesel cars and increased the number of diesel vans to 3 million.