Air and Water Pollution: Impact — House of Lords, 2017-10-26
Topic: Environment
Jennifer Elizabeth Randerson (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): We are a long way off it and have not got very far in the last year or so We take it for granted, as my noble friend Lord Jones pointed out, that we have access to clean drinking water when we turn on the tap. But that is not the case the world over and it is not the case with air quality. As we meet one standard on water quality, it is evident that other challenges arise. The right reverend Prelate referred to microplastic contamination and its impact, not just in the sea but on our water supply through the ingestion of microplastic beads. That demonstrates to me that we have to work in concert across the world, with other nations. Rivers present a constant challenge because four out of five of our rivers in England and Wales fail to meet good ecological standards, although my noble friend Lord Lee pointed out the importance of the improvements. I was grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Robathan, for his comments on marine pollution and for mentioning several campaigns on it. I also mention the work done by Sky News, which has run a long-standing campaign on plastic pollution in the sea Many speakers have referred to the obvious importance of the impact of pollution on health, particularly air pollution as an insidious threat. Many organisations are working on this now: the BMA, the British Lung Foundation, the British Heart Foundation and the Royal College of Physicians. Friends of the Earth has also done a great deal of work on this. I want to concentrate on transport because that accounts for a third of our NOx emissions and a fifth of our particulate emissions. That is an average across Britain but if you look at the figures for urban areas, you see that in many of them it accounts for two-thirds of air pollution. We have the worst urban air quality in Europe There is a reasonable level of public awareness of the link between nitrogen dioxide emissions and asthma. However, as noble Lords, including my noble friends Lady Walmsley and Lady Jolly, have said, many other problems can be ascribed to this including premature births, low birth weight, child mortality, the development of children’s lungs and the decline of lung function in older people. Diesel emissions also cause cancer. We accept the evidence and take action in our personal lives to deal with the link between smoking and cancer, but we are at a much earlier level of public awareness of the impact of poor air quality It is much more difficult for people—in particular, children—to avoid poor air quality than it is for them to avoid the impact of smoking, unless they have the misfortune to live in a family where people smoke indoors. Children cannot avoid the pollution because they hold their parents’ hands and are taken across the road at the level of exhaust pipes and there are so many cars idling outside schools. We have a great deal of work to do. Will the Minister says how the Government are going to address the public health emergency we face and raise public awareness of it? It is important that that is done because the measures that need to be taken will not be accepted unless there is public awareness. When people bought diesel cars—I was one of them—they did so with the best of intentions. Tackling climate change was a top priority, and people realised the impact of nitrogen dioxide and particulates from diesel vehicles only later. Since then, the EU has had a key role in upgrading standards. I take issue with the noble Earl, Lord Caithness: it was not the EU that let us down about diesel vehicles; it was Volkswagen, which tried to evade EU standards The Government’s response to this public health emergency has been totally inadequate. That is not just my view; it is the view of the courts. In February, the EU Commission gave the UK a final warning over its failure to meet targets on air pollution. Reference has already been made to the fact that the Government spent £370,000 trying to avoid publishing their plan, but they have now published a third version of it and it is still totally inadequate. I shall now mention some of the things that the Government should be doing to achieve a comprehensive action plan to improve air quality. We have to change driving habits, and we have to empower local authorities to take action in communities. That is needed at local and national level as well as internationally. Some actions will take time and be expensive; other actions are inexpensive and can be done immediately, such as having far more monitoring sites and air pollution indication signage in pollution hotspots. That would alert the public and encourage people to apply a no-idling rule outside schools, for example. This sort of thing is already being trialled in London, and it is very easy, quick and efficient to do. In turn, this information should be used as the basis for ultra-low emission zones, another thing that London is introducing King’s College’s research has shown that London breached its air pollution limit just five days into 2017, so it certainly needs ultra-low emission zones. In the country as a whole, only six out of 43 monitoring zones in the UK were compliant with legal NOx limits. We welcome the Automated and Electric Vehicles Bill but we need a much broader Bill that includes a well-targeted diesel scrappage scheme There are schemes in the Bill to improve the number of charging points, but there is no reference, for example, to using lamp-posts as locations for them. Diesel buses, hydrogen buses and all these things need to be addressed by the Government in order to have a much more comprehensive approach to this problem.