Clean Air (Human Rights) Bill [HL]

Lord Thomas of Gresford Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 8th July 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Thomas of Gresford (LD)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, in particular, on her focus on clean air as a human right. It is curious how the Conservative Party continues to undervalue the great British achievement promoted by Winston Churchill: the European Convention on Human Rights. When it was drafted by the team led by Sir David Maxwell Fyfe, a prosecutor at Nuremberg and later Lord Chancellor under Churchill, Eden and Macmillan, it was designed to protect the rule of law, human rights and democracy in Europe. However, it was always intended that the convention should be a living instrument subject to teleological interpretation—not fixed in stone, but to be interpreted and updated from time to time in the light of modern needs and understanding. The European Court of Human Rights was designed to be the instrument which kept the convention up to date and relevant through its judgments.

The convention was passed and ratified in 1950 and came into force in 1953. An express right to clean air was not included. I remember the 1950s, when pollution was not perceived as seriously as it is today. Within a three-mile radius of my home in Wrexham, there were eight working collieries. I was accustomed to seeing miners, black from the pit, squatting on their haunches in the street—a comfortable position if you were working four-foot seams. They would frequently spit out the black coal dust which caked their lungs. Every household burned coal. Buildings were black. Housewives made sure to bring the washing in if there was a threat of rain to avoid black sooty streaks on their linen. Up the road in Brymbo the steelworks belched out smoke, and in Cefn Mawr people’s complexions were yellow from the acrid fumes of the chemical works.

The smogs in London of 1952, to which the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, referred, led to the first Clean Air Act of 1956. This, and subsequent Acts, did much to clear the air of obvious smoke and smoke-borne pollutants. But hidden pollutants, particulates and toxic emissions were increasingly a threat to health. In a series of judgments, the European Court of Human Rights determined that the right to life protected by Article 2 of the convention was engaged where activities endangering the environment, such as toxic emissions, also endangered human life. The European court required the state to put in place a legislative and administrative framework which would uphold the right to life—a framework similar to the Bill we are considering. If this was a novel duty, it was a valid and practical interpretation of the convention.

Similarly, toxic emissions were held to engage Article 8, the right to respect for private and family life. Where pollution levels exceed safe limits near a person’s home, European judges decided there was a violation of Article 8 on the ground that such pollution makes that person more vulnerable to various illnesses and adversely impacts his or her quality of life.

If we ever get to debate the British Bill of Rights, we will find Ministers arguing that we ought not to have new duties thrust upon us by foreign judges. However, this Bill, in light of the recent decision of the United Nations Human Rights Council, comes at precisely the right time to introduce explicitly into our domestic law the right to breathe clean air. Indeed, Clause 1(1) states:

“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.”


This is putting into the European convention an explicit reference to clean air.

Science does not stand still, nor does human behaviour. If we want to make some amazing advancements in tackling pollution, we need to fund technology and scientific research to find new solutions. This transformative Bill provides the vehicle for such advances and the machinery to monitor and update its standards. It provides for an agency to take the lead in judicial review or other proceedings to enforce its requirements. Finally, we must always bear in mind that we must take people with us. Measures to reduce pollution may cause large societal changes and unforeseen consequences that we must expect, but the Bill is an important step forward.