Clean Air (Human Rights)

Siân Berry Excerpts

1st reading
Tuesday 1st July 2025 Commons Chamber

[Siân Berry (Brighton Pavilion) (Green)]

I beg to move,

That leave be given to bring in a Bill to establish the right to breathe clean air; to require the Secretary of State to achieve and maintain clean air in England; to make provision about environmental targets and minimum standards in relation to clean air; to make provision about the powers, duties and functions of public bodies in England in relation to air pollution; to give the Office for Environmental Protection additional powers and duties related to clean air; to require the Secretary of State to comply with the United Nations Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution; to require the Secretary of State and public authorities to apply specified environmental principles in carrying out their duties under this Act; and for connected purposes.

I am grateful for the chance to present the Clean Air (Human Rights) Bill, alongside cross-party colleagues. The Bill is about the right to breathe clean air, and the right to grow up and to grow old without stunted lungs, without preventable diseases like asthma, and without disabling and potentially lethal harm being done to our lungs, hearts and brains by preventable air pollution. We call this Bill Ella’s law because it is also about a little girl—a nine-year-old who made history and whose memory powers this campaign for environmental, social, and indeed racial justice. I am grateful to the many hon. and right hon. Members who are here to listen to her story today. Ella’s mother, Rosamund Adoo-Kissi-Debrah CBE, is also here in the Gallery, with Ella’s sister and brother, Sophia and Robert. I know that the whole family have many good friends in this House. [Hon. Members: “Hear, hear!”]

Ella Roberta Adoo-Kissi-Debrah had nearly 30 emergency hospital admissions between her first diagnosis of asthma at the age of six and her tragic death, aged just nine, on 15 February 2013. Throughout her illness there had been no mention of air pollution being a possible factor in her condition, and Ella’s original death certificate simply said that she had died of acute respiratory failure. Her mother Rosamund did not know why her lively, sporty and talented daughter had become so ill after being such a healthy child.

Years after Ella died, Rosamund began to ask questions and push for answers. The family lived close to the heaving South Circular Road in London—one of the busiest main roads in Europe. With the help of medical and scientific experts such as Professor Stephen Holgate, Rosamund began to realise that there could be a link between the high air pollution where they lived and the course of Ella’s illness. Together they began to ask: was air pollution responsible for Ella developing asthma in the first place, and were high pollution days responsible for triggering the repeated attacks and emergencies that eventually took her life? Taking new knowledge and evidence, working with legal professionals like Jocelyn Cockburn, a long road began to a new inquest and a landmark new death certificate that, for the first time in the world, cited air pollution.

In December 2020, deputy coroner Philip Barlow ruled for this change, and said that

“excessive levels of air pollution”

had made a “material contribution” to Ella’s death. In his report to prevent future deaths, he recommended that the Government should take note that there was no safe level for particulate matter and that World Health Organisation guidelines should be seen as minimum requirements. He said that legally binding targets based on them would reduce the number of deaths from air pollution in the UK, and highlighted the lack of public awareness and information about daily pollution levels. That is what this Bill will do: set targets in law, based on the very latest World Health Organisation guidelines, and provide a pathway to comply.

Ella’s illness began in 2010 and spanned a period when the area around her home experienced some of the highest levels of air pollution, consistent breaches of legal limits and terrible injustices. In 2010, that area should not have had anything like those levels of pollution. That is because, following intensive work by the campaigner and friend of Ella’s law, Simon Birkett, the founder of Clean Air in London, alongside environmental campaigners in Europe, European Commission directive 2008/50/EC had entered into force in June 2008.

That directive set limit values for annual average nitrogen dioxide concentrations in the air people breathe of 40 micrograms per metre cubed, and those limits should have been met by 1 January 2010. It also set the first limit values for small particulates, which are even more deadly at the smallest particle sizes and in much lower concentrations. In the UK we did not achieve these limits before 2010, when Ella’s illness began, or even soon after. Instead, this period was one of delay to clean air zones, deception by diesel car manufacturers and even a mayor putting glue on the roads next to the air quality monitoring stations on days when legal particulate limits might be breached. This was a true scandal and a tragedy.

I hope the Government are aware that the 2010 limits are still far from being fully reached in parts of England today. Their own projections say that parts of the country will not become compliant until 2029, 2032 or even 2045. Those legal limits were based on the 2005 air quality guidelines from the World Health Organisation. In 2021, the WHO halved its guideline for the smallest particulates and slashed its guideline for nitrogen dioxide from 40 micrograms per metre cubed to 10. A new EU directive entered into force for our neighbours in December 2024.

It is clear that we need something new here as well, and success is clearly possible. There has been much better action in recent years in some areas, notably London, and a good proportion of that has been due to the influence of Rosamund on the Mayor of London, as well as determined campaigning by groups like Mums for Lungs, the Healthy Air Coalition, Asthma + Lung UK, Clean Air in London, Friends of the Earth, ClientEarth and many others. We are making some progress, but to respect the right to breathe clean air, we must move faster and work more widely in the transition to clean heating, cleaner transport and cuts in pollution from aviation, farming and industry. The second best time to do the right thing is always now.

Last month, on Clean Air Day 2025, I was pleased alongside other MPs to meet doctors and campaigners, including Rosamund, on their walk and wheel to Parliament from Great Ormond Street hospital. They brought us the latest important medical evidence from the Royal College of Physicians, whose new report to MPs highlights and summarises evidence gained over the last decade, showing that there are now links between air pollution and almost every organ in the body and the diseases that affect them. It estimates that during 2025, 500 premature deaths per week will be attributable to air pollution, and calculates that there was an economic burden of £27 billion in 2019 due to healthcare costs, productivity losses and reduced quality of life. Above all, the report highlights how air pollution is a preventable public health threat. This Bill would give us the tools to prevent it, bringing the nearly 70-year-old Clean Air Act 1956 up to date and in line with the excellent blueprint published today by the Healthy Air Coalition.

Introducing the Bill again during this Session is important. The cross-party proposers want to extend and build on the efforts of Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb and others who helped steer a similar Bill through the other place in 2022. My predecessor the former hon. Member for Brighton Pavilion, Caroline Lucas, promoted the same Bill in this House after that, right up to the end of the previous Parliament.

The ultimate hope of us all is that this Government will adopt and back Ella’s law in her memory: adopt its provisions, take up the important actions it will mandate and recognise in law the human right to breathe clean air as soon as possible. For the other children who still die unnecessarily due to air pollution, and for the families who still lose loved ones to dementia, cancer, heart disease and other issues caused and made worse by dirty air, I ask the House for leave to present this Bill in that hope.

Question put and agreed to.

Ordered,

That Siân Berry, Ms Stella Creasy, Bell Ribeiro-Addy, Wera Hobhouse, Shockat Adam, Seamus Logan, Claire Hanna, Afzal Khan, Ellie Chowns, Ruth Jones, Uma Kumaran and Dr Roz Savage present the Bill.

Siân Berry accordingly presented the Bill.

Bill read the First time; to be read a Second time on Friday 7 November, and to be printed (Bill 279).