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Ruth Cadbury
Main Page: Ruth Cadbury (Labour - Brentford and Isleworth)Department Debates - View all Ruth Cadbury's debates with the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
(8 years, 8 months ago)
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Ruth Cadbury (Brentford and Isleworth) (Lab)
10. What steps she is taking to improve monitoring of levels of air pollution.
Naz Shah (Bradford West) (Lab)
11. What steps she is taking to improve monitoring of levels of air pollution.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Rory Stewart)
The Department continues to improve its monitoring of levels of air pollution in line with the EU ambient air quality directive, and the computer programme to calculate emissions from road transport, or Copert. We have increased the number of nitrogen dioxide monitoring stations by more than 30% over the past three years.
Ruth Cadbury
Air pollution will cost many more thousands of lives if air quality is not improved significantly. How will the Government achieve legally binding targets for air pollution if the third runway at Heathrow is permitted?
Rory Stewart
The current objective is to focus on nitrogen dioxide thresholds and ensure that we reduce ambient air quality rates below 40 micrograms per cubic metre. Heathrow is a totally separate question that must be assessed independently by the Environment Agency and our air quality monitors, to see whether ambient air quality targets are met.