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

To ask Her Majesty's Government what steps they are taking to ensure that the forthcoming Environment Bill and all other relevant environmental legislation enshrines legally binding provisions to meet air quality standards, set out by the World Health Organization.

The draft Environment Bill, published in December last year, would place the 25 Year Environment Plan on a statutory footing by establishing a new statutory cycle of environmental planning, monitoring and reporting. The Government also committed to exploring the inclusion of additional targets for environmental improvement within this cycle.

In the Environment Bill policy paper, also published in December last year, we reaffirmed that improving air quality is a key part of our plan to leave the environment in a better state than we found it.

In our Clean Air Strategy, published in January this year, we set out our ambition to reduce people’s exposure to fine particulate matter (PM_2.5) and committed to setting a new, ambitious, long-term target to reduce people’s exposure to PM_2.5. We also committed to publishing a report this year examining what action would need to be taken to meet the World Health Organization’s (WHO) PM_2.5 annual mean guideline level of 10μg/m³, and we will use this evidence to inform the target which we set.

The actions in the Strategy will reduce concentrations of PM_2.5 for everyone, resulting in a halving of the number of people living in areas with annual mean concentrations of PM_2.5 above the WHO’s guideline level of 10μg/m³ by 2025, compared with 2016.

We are the first major economy to set out ambitions based on the WHO’s PM_2.5 targets, and our Clean Air Strategy was welcomed by the WHO’s Director General as “an example for the rest of the world to follow.”