Air Pollution: London

Virendra Sharma Excerpts

Tuesday 27th April 2021 Westminster Hall

[Mr Virendra Sharma (Ealing, Southall) (Lab) [V]]

Thank you, Mrs Murray, for giving me the opportunity to contribute to this important debate. I congratulate the hon. Member for Twickenham (Munira Wilson) on securing it, and thank her for doing so.

I want to speak about point source pollution and the need for comprehensive planning law that crosses boroughs to protect lives. Redeveloping sites, building new affordable homes and giving people places to live are good. We need more housing, but it is not always simple to make those sites habitable. We need new laws to protect the people who are already there, which may mean delaying or not redeveloping some sites, but it is for the good of everyone.

In air quality, there is a concept of total load. In London, that is already high The background or baseline level of air pollution that we suffer daily makes us more susceptible to local increases. In areas such as my constituency, polluting activities have been grandfathered in, and many of my constituents have not seen the air quality improvements that so many others have enjoyed. That is just one face of the systematic racism that black, Asian and minority ethnic people encounter; their health is so often sacrificed for the benefit, economic or otherwise, of others. Environmental justice means not letting that happen and not tolerating pockets of more polluted air because it is hoped that people in those diverse areas might complain less. Getting away with it is not justice. It is racism.

Many sites that companies such as Berkeley Group are so keen to redevelop are deeply contaminated with poisonous chemicals, so that even when they are redeveloped carefully, and even when there is proper monitoring, the total load is driven higher. While on the site itself limits might not be exceeded, people living around it will be exposed to dangerous levels of pollution and their lives will be put at risk. That happens today in my constituency and many others. PM₁₀, mentioned earlier, and PM_2.5— particulate measures for which there are really no safe limits—build up from traffic, the Southall gasworks redevelopment by Berkeley Group, the tarmac factory in the next constituency, smaller building sites and other businesses. While each of those factors may itself be within a safe limit, they combine to create a totally unsafe state.

Planning, therefore, has to cross borough boundaries and consider the other industries and activities in an area before permitting building and redevelopment. A modelling system that took all the different pollutants into account would still be unfit for purpose if it did not liaise across boundaries. That approach would mean delaying some redevelopments when one was already going on in the same area. More importantly, it would mean that some would never go ahead because the total load in the area was already too high. Environmental justice cannot be secured by the millions in need of it until the planning process puts the real lived experience of people at the heart of the system.