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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what recent estimate he has made of the number of air quality monitoring stations in use in (a) Birmingham and (b) Manchester.

Information about the number of sites in Defra’s national monitoring network is published on the UK Air Information Resource (UK-AIR), this is updated in real-time to provide a live representation of the national monitoring network.

There are 3 air quality monitoring sites which are part of Defra’s national monitoring networks located in Birmingham, out of a total of 8 sites in the West Midlands metropolitan county. In Manchester, there are 2 sites from a total of 6 in the Greater Manchester metropolitan county.

In addition to the national UK Air Quality monitoring networks, Local Authorities, businesses and academics carry out monitoring and modelling of air quality. Information on sites managed by Local Authorities and those that make up national networks managed by Defra can be found on UK-Air (https://uk-air.defra.gov.uk/networks/find-sites and https://uk-air.defra.gov.uk/interactive-map).