Air Quality (Nottingham) (Hansard, 19 April 1996)

§ Mr. Graham Allen (Nottingham, North)
I am delighted to bring before the House today the important subject of air pollution, particularly as it affects my constituency and the city of Nottingham. Last week, three 11-year-old pupils of Southglade junior school in Bestwood park in my constituency wrote to me about the issue. Abby Herod, Laura Bowen and Zoe Tolcher said in their letter: We are disappointed with the atmosphere that we are breathing in. We would like you to put a stop to all the fumes that are coming from all the cars and factories. Couldn't we use bicycles and buses more often—that will make less fumes and gases so the air will be safer. I should like to dedicate today's debate to those three young people, and to the many others in my constituency who have this week discussed the issue of air pollution in Nottingham and elsewhere.
Those young people will be the main campaigners when we tackle the problem seriously in the future. They will save the planet from air pollution, and they will see through the policies necessary to ensure that our air is once again fit to breathe.
Local media will also play an important role. The local newspaper, the Nottingham Evening Post, has led a vociferous air quality campaign in our city. It is essential that the politicians and the decision-makers—I am glad that the Under-Secretary of State for the Environment, the hon. Member for Hertsmere (Mr. Clappison), is to respond to the debate—are informed about public opinion.
We have no choice but to breathe air which continues to be polluted. Poor air quality causes poor health. Britain's air quality has deteriorated by 35 per cent. in the past 10 years. Asthma kills about 2,000 people a year, and one in seven children in Nottingham are affected by asthma, like children in every constituency throughout the land.
The link between air pollution and worsening asthma conditions is now well accepted. A recent study in Birmingham found that children admitted to hospital with asthma were more likely to live close to busy roads than those who were admitted for other reasons. Government research has linked airborne particles to lung and heart disease. It is now accepted that lower levels of pollution than originally thought adversely affect health.
Much good work has been done in this area in Nottingham and elsewhere, dating back to the 1950s. The most obvious pollutants have been dealt with: the smoke and sulphur dioxide created by coal burning and factory emissions have been subject to ever greater controls. However, the main air pollution villain in modern Britain, including in my constituency, is the motor car and other vehicular traffic which burns diesel and petrol fuels.
Unfortunately, delays in Government funding for Nottingham's automatic urban monitoring station mean that I do not have the precise figures for Nottingham's air quality. However, I imagine that they are not dissimilar to the figures for London's air quality. In London, traffic is responsible for 99 per cent. of carbon monoxide emissions, 76 per cent. of nitrogen oxides and 96 per cent. 1021 of black smoke, including particulates. It is a sad record, but I am delighted to report that the local authorities in Nottingham and the surrounding area are working hard to solve the problem, and they have made a great deal of progress.
Despite 85 per cent. of its revenue being at the beck and call of Government—like that of most other local authorities—Nottingham has set about tackling the air pollution problem. I pay tribute to those in the city and in the county council—both at officer and at councillor level—for their hard work. I shall give some examples of that work.
Nottingham city council has introduced a pioneering scheme, the green commuter scheme, which I had the privilege of helping to launch several months ago. It aims to reduce traffic congestion and to improve air quality. The county council is encouraging its staff to car-share and to use their cars less for journeys to work—the first time that any county council has introduced such a scheme.
The same two councils have been involved in conducting pioneering research with Dr. Margaret Bell and her team at the university of Nottingham. Pollution monitors worth £140,000 are now in place at schools, roundabouts and junctions in and around Nottingham, and they are linked to the urban traffic control centre. Those devices monitor traffic flow—the stops and starts, the congestion and the pollution—and produce a report on the city's air quality. The project hopes that, by revealing how changes in transport affect the quality of environment, it will encourage ideas on reducing the need for travel and promoting public transport by encouraging people to live closer to their place of work, use bicycles or, where appropriate, walk to work.
I hope that the Minister will take up my offer to come to Nottingham and see that valuable work. I know that he will be impressed, and I very much hope that he will feel that it is some of the best practice in the United Kingdom, which he may wish to share with other local authorities to encourage them.
Nottinghamshire is the first county council to display travel information on the Internet, and it hopes shortly to explore the use of cable television and variable message signs to help reduce congestion by getting information about the state of our roads to people in their homes before they leave for work or leisure activities, thus, one hopes, helping them to decide whether to leave the car at home and use public transport.
Those local councils have proved that, if they are given the tools, they will get on with the job and help to tackle the problem of air quality and pollution in our city. We all know that much more could be done. Local authorities such as Nottingham and Nottinghamshire, although they have an excellent record in tackling air quality, as demonstrated by the introduction of smoke control areas—one needs only to talk to councillors and council officers—know that they could do a heck of a lot more if the Government helped and encouraged them along the way.
For example, work could start quickly to minimise hot spots, where pollution is particularly chronic, and to reduce the incidence of summer and winter smog. It is necessary first to pinpoint the most severe problems and measure the pollution, and then take action to alleviate it.
1022 Councillor John Hartshorne, the chairman of the council's environment committee, told me that Nottingham was keen to be one of the pilot areas tackling traffic pollution problems, but the Government rejected its bid. Along with a number of forward-thinking authorities, Nottingham scraped together its precious spare cash—that is indeed a precious commodity in these days of restraints on local council spending—and paid for its own traffic pollution monitoring facilities.
The local authorities that were chosen for the pilot projects on congestion monitoring were given only £3 million, as opposed to the £15 million that they calculated as necessary to do the job adequately.
Another way in which councils could be encouraged to tackle the problem of local air pollution and air quality involves car and lorry exhaust checks. Half all traffic pollution is generated by just 10 per cent. of the vehicles, so spot checks on cars and lorries are vital. However, only the police have the power to stop vehicles.
I am not asking the Minister to make a snap judgment today, but to go away and think about an issue that he and the Government have already considered and that needs to be re-examined. There should be discussions with the police to figure out how that power could be shared, so that local councils, perhaps working with the Vehicle Inspectorate, in certain tightly defined circumstances could have the power to stop vehicles.
An immense number of practical problems need to be resolved. We would not want people to pretend to be vehicle inspectors or local authority employees in order to stop people who were driving alone at night, but if the power were tightly defined, perhaps by agreeing certain hours and certain places where vehicles could be stopped, and if the individuals were appropriately uniformed and had appropriately screened, local authorities might be able to get on with the job of monitoring vehicle emissions and advising drivers how best to tackle that problem. There is no easy answer, but I hope that the Minister will at least think about the problem with an open mind and see whether there is an answer to it.
The Environment Act 1995 will allow for the introduction, in 1997, of regulations giving local authorities the power to enforce local road closures and diversions if air quality standards are breached in pollution hot spots. However, although a trunk road passing through the centre of Nottingham is likely to be the primary source of traffic pollution in the area, the local authority has no powers over trunk roads, and will only be able to close, or divert traffic away from, surrounding roads. Again, the Minister may wish to look at that power to see whether it can be extended.
What can the Government do further to assist local authorities? First, they must get their own job sorted out, and get their own house in order. The Government have said that they will set national targets for the nine worst pollutants, but as yet the provisions are not in force. Although a small group of local councils are piloting the initiative, the Government have stipulated that 2005 will be the year in which they hope to achieve their air quality objectives. Surely that policy could be reviewed by the Minister.
The problem is certainly getting worse. The Department of Transport has predicted that car use will more than double its 1988 level by 2025. Unfortunately, the Government have no transport policy to speak of. 1023 Indeed, I understand that they want to wind up the Department of Transport, because they do not see it as having any function.
The Government also, sadly, continue to do little to promote transport choice or the shift from the private car to buses, trains, bicycles and walking. If that shift does not take place, there will be a huge increase in the number of traffic jams in my city and in cities throughout the land. The Minister well knows that a car idling in a traffic jam can double its fuel consumption, and can put double the amount of pollution into the atmosphere compared with a vehicle travelling at its best average speed.
I am not putting an anti-car view. On the contrary, we can have more cars, as people do in Germany. In Germany, however, although there is a higher level of car ownership, there is a lower level of car use, because there are adequate public transport alternatives. People have cars, but use them less; that should in many ways be the slogan we adopt in our environmental policy on traffic.
No one pretends that the answers are easy or straightforward, but much can be done at all levels—city, county and national Government. We need policy co-ordination. Professor Richard Madeley of the department of public health at Nottingham university told me that, at the moment, it can cost £2.60 for two people to go to Nottingham city centre by bus, whereas it costs only 70p to park there for two hours.
We need to consider co-ordination and integration, and we need to encourage people, not least by the price mechanism, to use appropriate forms of transport rather than doing what we all do, which is to drag the car into the middle of the city, often with only one person in it, thus holding up the bus which often has 30, 40 or 50 people in it.
Local councils need time to plan the air quality management areas proposed in the Environment Act. So far, they have received no timetable, no funding and no guidance. Perhaps the Minister can tell us why there has been a delay.
People in Nottingham and throughout the country increasingly demand clean, green alternatives to private cars. The Government must now allow local authorities to create some of the transport choices that will lead us towards a greener future. We shall also need to look at the levels of funding for local authorities so that they can perform the job appropriately. It is not necessarily a matter of more funding. The problem could be solved by having stable funding. Ministers in all spending Departments are aware that annual funding for authorities or any organisation causes difficulties for those Ministers who are trying to make serious efforts to tackle key problems.
Nottingham is trying to tackle air pollution and air quality, but it has one hand tied behind its back. The Government should consider a range of additional policies to help tackle air pollution, including encouraging employers to introduce a green commuter plan, as Nottingham has done. The Government should make public transport better, more environmentally friendly and more pleasant to use, not least by increasing the use of buses. That could be facilitated by considering bus re-regulation, which is obviously necessary in a number of our cities because cowboy operators turn up with old 1024 charabancs that belch out black smoke to the detriment of the good public, municipal and private operators. Fuels with lower sulphur content should be used.
The Government should promote changed work patterns to reduce traffic peaks and pollution hot spots. We should make the fullest use of railways and inland and coastal waterways for the transport of goods and to discourage long-haul road transport, when appropriate. We need to develop and implement alternative sources of energy to fossil fuels; introduce priority vehicle schemes in city centres; and fund park-and-ride schemes.
There are many possibilities. Public transport, for example, could use more energy-efficient vehicles. In Nottingham, we could fuel vehicles from electricity generated by burning refuse. Public transport vehicles that operate in a mainly pedestrianised city centre could be fuelled from non-fossil-fuel-generated electricity. That would make a major contribution to air quality in the city centre.
A whole raft of bright ideas and innovative thinking is out there. There are bags of ideas. I ask the Minister to consider the fact that there are answers, provided we work at them. My final words to the Minister come from the three young people that I quoted when at the beginning of my speech—Abby, Laura and Zoe. They said: If you or any one else won't do something about it, this earth will soon fade away and kill every living thing. Nearly all gases are dangerous to us so can you please try and do something about this. I could not have put it better myself.

§ The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Environment (Mr. James Clappison)
I welcome the opportunity to respond to a debate on the important subject of air quality, on which much progress has recently been made. Standards are rising, and that is right. Air quality is an important issue, in Nottingham as elsewhere in the country. I am happy to accept the invitation of the hon. Member for Nottingham, North (Mr. Allen) to visit Nottingham to see what is happening there.
Nottingham is part of the United Kingdom's smoke and sulphur dioxide monitoring network, and also takes part in the national nitrogen dioxide tube survey. That monitoring indicates that Nottingham experiences air quality that is, on the whole, pretty typical for urban areas in the United Kingdom, and levels of smoke and sulphur dioxide are well below the EC limit values.
We are currently improving our national monitoring networks further, to improve our assessment of the extent to which air quality standards and targets are being achieved; to provide better information to the public and other interested bodies; and to improve our understanding of air quality problems. To that end, this year we are expanding our automatic monitoring network to around 100 sites, including seven new automatic monitoring stations, one of which—the hon. Member will be pleased to hear—will be in Nottingham.
That site will provide continuous and accurate monitoring of ozone, nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, sulphur dioxide and particulate matter, to which the hon. Member drew attention. We are discussing an appropriate site for the station with the city council.
We need to do more than just monitor air quality. The air quality in the United Kingdom is generally pretty good, and has improved considerably over the past 30 to 1025 40 years, but the Government recognise that many people are concerned about the smell, nuisance and potential health effects of some pollutants, We want to improve living conditions, especially in our cities and for the sake of future generations. We are determined to manage and improve air quality, both across the nation and wherever there are particular problems.
We are now preparing our first national air quality strategy, which will set air quality standards and targets and outline the measures that will be taken at international, national and local level to meet them. That will build on the controls that are already in place.
The United Kingdom already has in place one of the most sophisticated industrial air pollution control systems in Europe, consisting of integrated pollution control and local authority air pollution control. Authorisations are based upon what is described as the best available techniques not entailing excessive cost, which are reviewed every four years.
The first large review of integrated pollution control authorisations, dealing with electricity generators, has recently been completed. That will result in very substantial reductions in emissions of sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxides and particulates. Emissions of sulphur dioxide and smoke from domestic households are controlled through the smoke control area system, which was introduced in 1956. Nottingham has five integrated pollution control processes in operation and 65 local authority air pollution controls. It completed its smoke control programme in 1991, so all households in the city fall within smoke control areas.
The hon. Gentleman mentioned vehicle emission, which is another important source of pollution, besides industrial pollution. It concerns many people. Traffic is a major pollutant, and in many of our towns and cities today it is the main source of air pollution.
Emissions from the transport sector are mainly controlled through European Community legislation, in particular through emission standards for new vehicles and standards on the quality of automotive fuels. European standards for new vehicles were agreed in the early 1990s, which made the fitting of catalytic convertors to petrol cars compulsory from 1993. Even more stringent standards for vehicles have been agreed for 1996–97.
These measures will provide the backbone to our policies for reducing emissions from road transport. As the proportion of vehicles conforming to the tougher standards grows, emissions of air pollutants should fall dramatically over the next 10 years—despite a likely steady rise in the size of the vehicle fleet and the number of kilometres driven. However, an increase in the volume of traffic will affect that picture over the longer term. Therefore, we need further progress to reduce average emissions per vehicle.
The European Commission is expected to bring forward new proposals for vehicle emission and fuel quality standards for the year 2000 and beyond. We shall be looking to agree a positive, cost-effective package of measures that will bring down vehicle emissions substantially and bring us closer to meeting our air quality objectives. As the cleaner vehicles come to predominate in the fleet, we will also tighten the enforcement standards for them, as the hon. Gentleman mentioned.
1026 However, technological fixes are not enough; patterns of behaviour must change as well. We are therefore encouraging public and private fleet operators to act in an environmentally responsible way, and we are providing the public with information about greener motoring habits. We need a framework for that action to ensure that everyone understands what the important air quality priorities really are; we need to bring that home to people.

§ Mr. Allen
I thank the Minister for his courtesy in giving way. What is the current state of the debate on the diesel versus petrol problem? Many of us bought diesel cars thinking we were doing the right and the green thing. Now we are told to have second thoughts.

§ Mr. Clappison
We keep the question of emissions from diesel under close review. The hon. Gentleman referred to particulates. He will know that there is an issue about emissions from diesels. He will also know the measures to deal with that taken by my right hon. and learned Friend the Chancellor in the last Budget, which perhaps reflect the changed thinking to which the hon. Gentleman referred. It is fair to say that diesels also cause pollution, and we will be examining that point as we seek higher standards in the European Community.
Our approach has been based on expert scientific evidence. We are working on the best available scientific advice and on the best advice on the best outcome for health.
We have recently received reports and recommendations from the independent expert panel on air quality standards, as well as the committee on the medical effects of particulates. We also take into account information from other sources such as the World Health Organisation.
On the basis of this technical and scientific advice, we are looking to set down clear national standards and objectives for air quality, to be achieved by a given timetable. We seek a national strategy backed up by flexible and cost-effective action at a local level, through the system of local air quality management areas, to which the hon. Member adverted. In the time that is left, I emphasise that they have an important role to play, particularly in the local management areas to which the hon. Gentleman adverted.
We are also committed to keeping our policies under review to ensure that progress is maintained. As the hon. Gentleman implied a moment ago, scientific views and knowledge change and we have to keep abreast of those changes. We also have to make the best possible information available to the general public.
Our air quality strategy is under consideration. We have been putting in place the elements for it. It will shortly be available. We look forward to building on the considerable achievements that we have already had in improving air quality. We want to see improved air quality for future generations. We are taking the action to achieve this. I am sure that will be welcome to everyone, including to the three young ladies in the hon. Gentleman's constituency to whom he referred.