Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee, Environmental Audit Committee, Health and Social Care Committee and Transport Committee

Mary Creagh Excerpts

Thursday 22nd March 2018 Westminster Hall

[Neil Parish (Tiverton and Honiton) (Con)]

Thank you, Mr Stringer. It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, I think for the first time. It is good that you had the benefit of being on the Joint Committee during the inquiry. I assure Members that I will not speak for 10 minutes, so as to allow more time for questions. I thank the Backbench Business Committee for facilitating this statement on our recent report, “Improving air quality”.

Before we begin, I am reminded that a year ago my Committee was taking evidence from the Minister when we were called to a Division. The unthinkable happened. We all stand here today because of the unflinching bravery of those on the frontline, in particular the courage of PC Keith Palmer. We carry on our work and we are all here today because we remember the great sacrifices that have been made to enable us to do so.

Clean air is a right and not a privilege. We launched a joint inquiry in October last year to examine the Government’s latest air quality strategy and whether it was adequate. I thank my fellow Select Committee Chairs, my hon. Friend the Member for Totnes (Dr Wollaston) from the Health and Social Care Committee, the hon. Member for Nottingham South (Lilian Greenwood) from the Transport Committee and the hon. Member for Wakefield (Mary Creagh) from the Environmental Audit Committee. I think we worked remarkably well together. I also thank the Committee staff for all their hard work in bringing it all together.

For too long, the United Kingdom has failed to meet legal air quality limits. That is simply not good enough. It was clear to us that Departments must work together to address this national health emergency. My fellow Chairs and I launched the joint inquiry to show that if we can work together, so can Government. We took evidence from expert witnesses, the Mayor of London, Ministers from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the Department for Transport, the Treasury and the Department for Communities and Local Government. It was clear to us that the Departments are not doing enough to protect the public from toxic air.

Poor air quality costs the UK some £20 billion a year, and it is a huge public health risk to all our constituents. Because of the failure to collaborate and to come up with an effective strategy, the Government are letting us down. Car manufacturers have contributed towards poor air quality for too long, and the Government have allowed that to happen and let them—in my opinion—off the hook. From the USA to Germany, car manufacturers have contributed millions of pounds to cleaning up their air. Why have we not had that contribution in this country?

Councils struggling with air quality need more leadership from Government to ensure that they have the resources to tackle the problem effectively. The Government must work more closely with councils to roll out vital infrastructure, especially electric vehicle charging points and fast-charging points. That would also help small and medium-sized enterprises and others if they wanted to convert to electric and hybrid vehicles, so that they had the charging points as well as the drivers.

All that must be included in a new clean air Act, which would concentrate the resources we so desperately need to clean up our air quality. A refusal to act is simply passing the buck. Our children and grandchildren deserve better. The Government should implement our recommendations and give us all the right to breathe cleaner air. I look forward to the Ministers’ responses to our report.

[Mary Creagh (Wakefield) (Lab)]

I echo the hon. Gentleman’s sentiments about this being a very solemn day for this place, when we remember the five victims who so tragically and suddenly lost their lives. In particular, we hold in our hearts PC Keith Palmer, who stood his ground, not 50 yards from this room, to defend this place and to defend our Parliament. The debt of gratitude that we owe him and his family can never be repaid.

One of the interesting things that came out of the inquiry was the huge and developing evidence about the impact of air pollution on health and health inequalities. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that a worrying piece of evidence that came out of the inquiry was research from the Royal College of Physicians showing that air pollution could reduce children’s birth weight and damage IQ, and that it was possibly an increasing factor in lung cancer for people who have never smoked?

I agree passionately that we need a new clean air Act. The Environmental Audit Committee has been looking at the accountability mechanisms. We need an environmental protection Act to set up an accountable body so that that mechanism is still in place if and when we leave the EU. The clock is ticking loudly on that. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that the Government need to speed up their activity in that area?

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that we need to adopt the World Health Organisation’s targets for all air pollutants, not just nitrogen dioxide, and to set out clear milestones for meeting them? It is all very well saying that it will happen in 10 or 15 years’ time, but if we do not have milestones, they will not be met.

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that the Government need to do much more on central Government procurement? They have said that 25% of Departments’ car fleets will be ultra low emission vehicles by 2022. We have just completed an audit of the Ministry of Justice. Of 1,500 vehicles, just two are ultra low emission. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has only two electric vehicles in its fleet. The Government need go much further and much faster, and to extend that target to outside agencies, including the NHS, because its carbon footprint is huge.

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that the cheapest and simplest method is to label vehicle emissions on new cars so that when a person goes into a car showroom, they know exactly what they are purchasing? That would mean that they could future-proof themselves against any action that might be taken by their local authority or by the Government, so they were not buying something that may lose its value in two or five years’ time.

[Neil Parish]

I thank the hon. Lady for her questions and, again, for her co-operation in putting the Joint Committee together. She will not be surprised to know that I very much agree with her points.

On the clean air Act, that is something we need the Government to come forward with, because it would concentrate not only resource but political drive on cleaning up our air. On the World Health Organisation’s targets, we need to be more ambitious than the Government are at the moment. On an environmental protection agency, we need to know more from the Government about how that would come about, how it would take on the role that the European Commission has had, and who could take the Government to court to hold them to account.

The car fleet is an interesting one. I expect that the hon. Lady, like me, has often come through Speaker’s Court and seen interesting vehicles waiting for Secretaries of State. The vehicles are all quite large, and as far as I can see very few have anything hybrid about them, so perhaps the Government could lead by example. It will be interesting to see what they do. This is a serious point, because as we get our new fleet of vehicles across all Departments, we need a series of electric vehicles and hybrids. For some places, all-electric will work. If people have to go longer distances, hybrids are essential. We look forward to working with all the other Select Committees to ensure that we deliver cleaner air.