Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether his Department has identified a link between air pollution and lung cancer in non-smoking persons.

The International Agency for Research on Cancer has classified outdoor air pollution and particulate matter in outdoor air pollution as carcinogenic to humans. This can be viewed at the following link:

https://monographs.iarc.fr/iarc-monographs-on-the-evaluation-of-carcinogenic-risks-to-humans-7/

Estimates in a recent paper on lung cancer in non-smoking people in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine co-authored by Public Health England show that nearly 6,000 never-smokers die of lung cancer in United Kingdom every year and that approximately 8% of these deaths may be attributable to outdoor air pollution. This can be viewed at the following link:

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41416-018-0029-6