Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what recent assessment he has made of the merits of a standalone Clean Air Act.

In the 2019 Clean Air Strategy we outlined our plans to bring forward new primary legislation on air quality and the Environment Bill delivers on this commitment.

The Bill makes a clear commitment to set a new target for fine particulate matter, the pollutant of most harm to health, alongside at least one further long-term air quality target. It also ensures that local authorities have a clear framework and simple to use powers for tackling air pollution in their areas, and it addresses a crucial regulation gap by providing the Government with new powers to enforce environmental standards for vehicles and non-road mobile machinery.

Alongside this, we have brought forward secondary legislation - the Air Quality (Domestic Solid Fuels Standards) Regulations 2020 to phase out the sale of the most polluting fuels starting 1 May 2021, helping to tackle a major source of fine particulate matter emissions in the UK. We have also recently brought forward the Air Quality (Legislative Functions) (Amendment) Regulations 2021, which will enable us to keep our Pollutant Release and Transfer Register (PRTR) legislation up to date with any technical, scientific or international Protocol advances.

Air pollution has reduced significantly since 2010 – emissions of nitrogen oxides are at their lowest level since records began. However, we know that we must continue to work to tackle air pollution. The Environment Bill also establishes a new statutory cycle of monitoring, planning and reporting, which comprises annual reports by the Government to Parliament on progress against targets, including those on air quality, regular scrutiny from the Office for Environmental Protection, and five-yearly reviews and updates of the Environmental Improvement Plan (EIP). An EIP must set out the steps the Government intends to take to improve the natural environment, which we would expect to include measures needed to meet its long term and interim targets.