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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what assessment he has made of the potential merits of bringing forward stand alone legislative proposals on clean air.

One of the key commitments in our Clean Air Strategy was to bring forward new legislation on air quality, and the Environment Bill – the first Environment Bill in over 20 years - is a key part of delivering this.

The air quality chapter in 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 government with new powers to enforce environmental standards for vehicles and non-road mobile machinery.

Alongside this, we recently passed legislation to phase out the sale of the most polluting fuels, 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 legislation up to date with any technical, scientific or international Protocol advances.