Quiet Cities

Debate between Rory Stewart and Peter Dowd

Tuesday 26th April 2016 Westminster Hall

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Rory Stewart)]

It is a great privilege to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hollobone. It is also a great privilege to respond to the speech by my hon. Friend the Member for The Wrekin (Mark Pritchard). I pay tribute to him for raising quiet cities, a striking and original subject that has not previously come across the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs desk.

Quiet cities are interesting because, as recently as the 1960s, noise was not considered within Britain’s policy framework. In fact, a man called John Connell, an earlier incarnation of my hon. Friend, made it his personal campaign to put noise on the agenda. He led a great campaign, which began by addressing the issue of noisy dustbin lids. His big thing was to introduce rubber dustbin lids, instead of metal ones. His next revolutionary move was to introduce rubber milk bottle stands, so that people were not woken in the morning by the milk being put on their doorstep. He became interested in the issue of airport noise, and he was the first great champion of what is now known as the Boris island project—he tried to get the Japanese to buy into the estuary island. He succeeded in making the British Government and British law take noise more seriously. I am sure that my hon. Friend’s efforts, following that great tradition, will inspire us to look at quiet cities.

Although quiet cities have not previously been done in Britain, as my hon. Friend says, we have green cities, smart cities and slow towns. Yinchuan, in north-west China, is an example of a quiet city, as are Brisbane in Australia, and Hartford in Connecticut. Those places have tried to brand themselves around the idea of peace and silence, as has my hon. Friend. The website of Brisbane, Australia, for example, lists a series of things that are prohibited, all the way from A for air conditioners to R for refrigerators, with dogs sitting at D.

The Government are engaging with the idea, but it is a local authority lead. It is important that the idea of a smart city, a green city or, in this case, a quiet city is locally driven. It is about how an area brands itself and thinks about itself and what its values might be. Someone like my hon. Friend can inspire a city or a town to take that lead, and I know that he has been having conversations with the candidates for Mayor of London about how the idea could be part of the agenda for London. Our colleagues in the Department for Communities and Local Government have proposed coinciding the idea of pocket parks and green areas in cities with the idea of quiet areas, where there would be prohibitions on creating noise.

As the hon. Member for Bootle (Peter Dowd) suggested in his intervention on motorcycles, there are a number of difficult balances to be struck: one person’s noise is occasionally somebody else’s joy; one person’s noise may be somebody else’s music; one person’s noise may be somebody else’s supercar; and one person’s noise may be a vibrant city. We have to balance such things, and we have to get that balance right, which is why local leadership and local ideas will be important.

The Government have adopted a number of measures over the years to address noise, and I will tick off some of the issues that have been raised. On railway noise, there has been a massive rail grinding programme across the country, which is primarily for public safety and energy but is also significantly reducing the decibel levels created by trains. We have heard a little about laying new road surfaces, and we now have a £300 million programme, of which a significant proportion will be directed towards reducing noise and new highway roll-out. We have Euro 6 standards for engines, which will reduce the decibel levels created by individual engines. We have product standards, so when people go into a shop and buy, for example, a lawn mower, they will be able to see how many decibels that particular lawn mower emits. We have building regulations that have reduced the amount of noise emitted in the construction of hundreds of thousands of houses, as well as reducing the amount of noise heard by people inside by moving bedrooms away from the front and by installing triple glazing.

All of that reflects the common understanding in this room that noise matters. Why does noise matter? We put a value of approximately £6 billion to £7 billion a year on the damage done by noise to health and quality of life. That will remind hon. and right hon. Members of the kinds of calculations we do on air pollution, which causes some £14 billion or £15 billion a year of damage, but in fact noise is different from air pollution. Air pollution, as the hon. Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott) has said in a previous debate, is a silent killer; people are often barely conscious of it.

Noise pollution causes significant health damage, largely driven by the effect on sleep and the stress that comes from loss of sleep. My father was severely deaf, and I was in a meeting this morning with a man who, through driving a vehicle in the 1960s, lost 70% of his hearing. He pointed out that the NHS spends £1,000 a year buying him new hearing aids. He sees three consultants a year, and the batteries of his hearing aids have to be replaced. His productivity in the workplace has been significantly affected by the fact that he cannot hear anything in meetings. The decision in the 1960s to save £500 by not putting a silencer on that vehicle has probably cost the public purse £20,000 or £30,000 over the life of that individual. There is not only a health impact; it is irritating, distracting, frustrating and infuriating to be disturbed by noise when tranquillity is at the core of what we care about.

[Peter Dowd]

We can talk in the abstract, but in my constituency the A5036, which leads down to the docks, is very loud. About half a dozen households on that road have been trying to get Highways England to provide acoustic amelioration. Will the Minister have a word with his colleagues in the Department for Transport and try to get Highways England to pull its finger out, if possible?

[Rory Stewart]

I would be delighted to set up a meeting with transport colleagues on that issue, which I thank the hon. Gentleman for raising. That issue is a microcosm of the issues that we are facing across the country, and there is often a difficult balance to be struck. We want infrastructure, we want roads, we want railways and we want planes, but all of our infrastructure, all of our communications and all of our industrial heritage are causing noise issues.