Air Pollution: Urban Areas

(asked on 16th July 2020) - View Source

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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what plans he has to improve air quality in towns and city centres.


Answered by
Rebecca Pow Portrait
Rebecca Pow
Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs)
This question was answered on 24th July 2020

Our Clean Air Strategy sets out an ambitious programme of action to reduce air pollution from a wide range of sources in our towns and cities. We have also put in place a £3.5 billion plan to tackle roadside nitrogen dioxide concentrations. Our Environment Bill makes a clear commitment to set a legally binding target to reduce fine particulate matter and enables greater local action by ensuring responsibility for tackling air pollution is shared across local government structures and with relevant public authorities. We are also strengthening the ability of local authorities to tackle smoke emissions from domestic solid fuel burning, which is a major source of fine particulate matter.

Under the Local Air Quality Management Framework, local authorities review and assess local air quality and are required to declare an Air Quality Management Area (AQMA) if local monitoring indicates exceedance of legal air quality standards and objectives, and are then required to develop an Air Quality Action Plan (AQAP) to address the exceedance.

Warrington Borough Council (WBC) has declared two AQMAs in the district, both for exceedances of the NO2 annual mean. As part of its AQAP, WBC is encouraging uptake of low emission vehicles and active travel. Defra has this year awarded £87,350 from the Air Quality Grant to WBC to run an electric taxi scheme.

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