§ Mr. SayeedTo ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs what plans her Department has to empower local authorities to provide mandatory air quality monitoring. [80501]
§ Alun MichaelLocal authorities have a duty under Part IV of the Environment Act 1995 to review and assess the air quality in their areas and to declare air quality management areas, where it appears that any air quality objective is unlikely to be met on time. This usually involves some monitoring of key pollutants, but the amount of monitoring varies from one authority to another depending upon the scale of any local air pollution problems.
There are no plans to make air quality monitoring mandatory for all local authorities. This would be disproportionately expensive. Authorities may instead make use of air quality monitoring data from the national automatic monitoring network run by my Department. Where my Department feels that an authority, which has no monitoring of its own, should undertake some air quality monitoring in its area, we may issue directions to that local authority indicating that it must do so.
We introduced the Air Quality Supplementary Credit Approval Programme to support authorities capital costs. Since 1997, the Government have awarded over £20 million to assist authorities with expenditure on air quality monitoring equipment, dispersion modelling and emissions inventories.