Britain
has some of the worst air pollution in Europe, so why does the government want
to scrap air quality monitoring stations?
For a country
whose capital city has the worst air quality in Europe, you would
expect England to be taking drastic steps to curb the problem of air pollution.
However, in a move of almost unparalleled recklessness, the government intends
to make changes that could result in the closure of up to 600 air quality
monitoring stations.
Ministers
want to remove obligations on local authorities to assess levels of air
pollution, a decision that could spell disaster for efforts to curb a problem
that causes 29,000 early deaths every year. This
scheme is part of the ‘Red Tape Challenge’, in which government departments
compete to make savings to their budgets.
What is even
more mind boggling is the justification for this irresponsible cost-cutting, as
outlined in the consultation document. After explaining the
extensive monitoring that is currently in place to assess air pollution, the
overview concludes:
“It is
therefore perhaps more important that local authorities focus their actions on
what is needed to… reduce the public health impacts of poor air quality rather
than continue their current focus on local assessment”.
In other
words, politicians wish to obscure the true scale of the problem and instead
gain some positive PR through superficial measures to green up our cities.
Monitoring is there for a reason – to inform and direct action. It is
impossible to have an effective air quality management strategy without it.
Justine
Greening, the excellent MP for Putney, is one senior minister who recognises
the importance of this process. She specifically identified the “detailed monitoring of air
pollution” as a means of tackling the problem in her constituency.
The
possibility of removing air quality monitoring stations is even more worrying
when we consider the lack of political action that characterises the current
approach to air pollution.
This summer,
the government twice failed on their duty to notify the
public about dangerous levels of ozone on 16 and 22 July in line with UK and
international law.
Ministers
have also refused to warn
drivers of diesel vehicles – potentially numbering in the hundreds of thousands
– that they risk legal action by removing particulate filters which reduce
emissions of carcinogenic gases.
This
catalogue of errors led to a Supreme Court ruling
this year that the government was not doing enough to tackle the problem of air
pollution. This decision by the highest court in the land could also pave the
way for legal action by the European Commission, which has the power to levy
huge fines for the government’s failure to meet air quality targets.
What is
needed is a total rethink of our approach to the problem of air pollution in
our society. Using a comparison originally made by the environmental journalist
George Monbiot, we need to make the same fuss over deaths caused by car fumes
as we do with cigarettes. Forget passive smoking, what about “passive driving”.
With smoking,
it is accepted that people have a moral right to harm themselves through their
own lifestyle choices but that this cannot be at the expense of others. Therefore,
people falling ill through passively inhaling cigarette smoke is rightfully
seen as unacceptable, and this is used as a justification for nearly all
government policies to discourage smoking.
