Air Quality: London

Lord Whitty Excerpts

Monday 3rd July 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Whitty (Lab)]

My Lords, I offer my warm congratulations to the noble Lord not only because he has initiated this debate but on giving us such a comprehensive and technically informed tour of the issues involved. I need to declare an interest as the current honorary president of Environmental Protection UK, which is the successor body to the National Society for Clean Air, one of the campaigning bodies that produced the Clean Air Act 1956, referred to by the noble Lord. My noble friend Lord Hunt, who will speak later in the debate, is also a former president of that organisation—not as far back as 1956, but nevertheless he made a significant contribution to it. I look forward to his speech.

As the noble Lord, Lord Borwick, said, the 1956 Act was a great landmark. It effectively removed smog and pea-souper fogs from London and thus transformed this city. But I have to tell noble Lords that the Government of the day were not initially persuaded of the necessity for such an Act. I have before me a confidential Cabinet committee paper, admittedly not a scoop because it dates back to 1953. In it Harold Macmillan, then the Housing Minister and a brilliant one in that role, did not initially take air pollution very seriously. Indeed, he was at his most disdainful and cynical. I shall quote him directly:

“Today everybody expects the Government to solve every problem. It is a symptom of the welfare state … For some reason or another, ‘smog’ has captured the imagination of the press and the people. I would suggest that we form a Committee. Committees are the oriflame of democracy. There are some short-term things which we have done; and can do. There are some longer-term solutions … We cannot do very much, but we can seem to be very busy—and that is half the battle nowadays”.


Eventually Harold Macmillan changed his mind, but only after another three years of vigorous public campaigning as well as the work of the committee of inquiry set up under Sir Hugh Beaver. Of course, later in his life Macmillan claimed the Clean Air Act as one of his great successes.

I now fear that more recent Governments, including the current one, have been as complacent as Macmillan originally was. Unfortunately, as the noble Lord has just said, there are still dangerous although invisible substances in our atmosphere which have yet to be tackled effectively and which again affect in particular the poorer communities within our population. Large parts of London still exceed EU standards for NO₂ and World Health Organization standards for both NO₂ and ultrafine particulates. These are damaging to cardiovascular health and can cause respiratory diseases. Although the calculations are complicated, they are thought to have caused up to 10,000 equivalents of death in London alone.

I take some responsibility as I have been both a Transport Minister and a Minister in Defra, and I briefly held the portfolio for air quality. Subsequently, I served on the board of the Environment Agency, which has responsibility for non-vehicular emissions. There has been some success in limiting point-source emissions but very little in relation to vehicular traffic. Moreover, the standards we have in place have been dramatically revealed to be inadequate. The Volkswagen scandal revealed a huge subterfuge in the motor sector to the detriment of the population at large, despite more rigorous EU standards and increasingly well-evidenced and assertive reports from medical and public health authorities.

Even the powers that we have had, we have failed to use. It is 20 years since I took legislation through this House to set up low-emission zones, but it has hardly been used. In London we now have the basis of low-emission zones and we have the mayor’s new air quality strategy as well as work being done in some London boroughs of all political persuasions, to which the noble Lord referred. All are attempting to do something about the problem, but we need to do significantly more. The theme of my speech today is that it is important that the mayor’s strategy is followed through so that the zones can be expanded and enforced, but a national strategy is needed to back that up. The mayor’s powers are limited and the lack of a national strategy has already twice been exposed in the High Court as inadequate in terms of the Government’s responsibilities under European legislation and under their own commitments.

Pushing all the responsibility on to local authorities, as the current draft strategy does, will not work. They need the staffing and the resources to deliver. That is even more the case in cities outside London which face greater challenges. However, the Government are going backwards on that as well. Of the 17 cities they first thought needed attention, it is now proposed that only five will go forward in the national strategy.

The scope of the powers also needs to be addressed. Although road transport is the major contributor to pollution in London, it actually accounts for less than half of it, as the noble Lord indicated in his speech. He referred to stand-by diesel generators, and indeed stand-by generators of any sort as well as decentralised energy sources and other forms of heating. Another example is off-road construction machinery. All of it contributes to pollution levels. These need to be addressed by the mayor, who does not actually have the power to do so very effectively.

There are of course trade-offs in this. The noble Lord referred to the biggest of them, which is between climate change objectives and air quality objectives and the overriding commitment to fuel efficiency and thus carbon saving. That has led to what in retrospect was a mistake when the balance of taxation was changed in favour of diesel vehicles. That has aggravated the situation significantly, so technology and regulation must catch up. We need to take a holistic approach. It should not be impossible for the motor industry, even using current technologies, to produce filters that can tackle carbon and other emissions which are damaging to public health. Technology ought to be able to provide solutions and regulation has to back it up.

Other choices such as wood burning are allegedly also carried out for environmental reasons. I have my doubts about wood burning myself because I think that it is more of a lifestyle choice, and it is an increasing contributor to pollution in London and elsewhere. There are other trade-offs in relation to road safety. The noble Lord referred to the dust produced by braking and how some road humps actually contribute to increased air pollution by vehicles. However, the humps save lives, so we need road design that can contribute both to road safety and improve air quality by reducing pollution.

I have a number of questions for the Minister. Do the Government accept the findings of the King’s College study which calculates a mortality equivalent of 9,500 deaths in London? Do the Government have figures for the number of staff and resources in local government, the Environment Agency and Defra and how they have reduced over the past few years? What has been the effect of that? Can the Minister tell us what will happen after Brexit, given that infraction proceedings will no longer be the enforcement mechanism? How will the Government enforce air quality standards? Again after Brexit, will the Government base policy on the same standards as the EU or will they adopt the WHO standards, which are more stringent? Will Volkswagen and any other transgressors face US-style penalties if they in effect distort testing results both on-road and off-road in the way that company did? Why is there no scrappage scheme for older diesel vehicles, and will all new diesel motors be subject to on-road, real driving tests, with those failing being banned? I have a number of other questions but I shall put them in writing for the Minister; these are enough to be going on with.

I hope that the dismissive tones of Harold Macmillan 64 years ago are not echoed by the Minister’s boss, Mr Michael Gove. In my capacity as president of EP UK I have written to Michael Gove urging him to set up a wide-ranging, high-powered independent clean air commission with the immediate task of helping to prioritise and allocate resources across government to ensure the effective enforcement of existing measures, and more particularly to develop a forward strategy and a new clean air Act. At the beginning, Macmillan was dismissive of experts; the current Secretary of State has been known to be similarly dismissive. In the end, Macmillan took their advice. The 1956 Act was, in retrospect, one of the few successful legacies of the Eden Government—a Government who, noble Lords may note, were an otherwise somewhat controversial and short-lived Conservative Administration, so it ought to have some attractions for the incumbents. I hope they adopt a more aggressive stance on this. It will be a real legacy that will benefit hundreds of thousands of citizens in London and beyond.