To move that this House takes note of the Report from the Science and Technology Committee The neglected pollutants: the effects of artificial light and noise on human health (2nd Report, Session 2022-23, HL Paper 232).
My Lords, I am delighted to introduce this Science and Technology Committee report on the effects of artificial light and noise on human health. I thank past and present committee members who participated in the report, especially those who will speak in today’s debate. As ever, huge thanks are due to the committee staff for their excellent assistance in preparing the report—Matthew Manning, Thomas Hornigold and Cerise Burnett-Stuart—and to our specialist adviser, Professor Russell Foster from the University of Oxford.
The inquiry ran from January 2023 to July 2023, with follow-up correspondence with Defra earlier this year that is available online. We had 38 oral witnesses, including scientists, architects, mental health experts and noise campaigners, as well as people from professional bodies, private companies, the UK Health Security Agency and relevant government departments. We also published 57 pieces of written evidence.
We decided to look at the impacts of noise and light on people because of the growing evidence base for the impacts on health. Although many of them are on animals rather than on us, there is a common thread in the impact of noise and light on our circadian rhythms. While we have a noise policy statement, and have had one since 2010, we have no equivalent for light despite a dramatic increase in artificial lighting both inside and outdoors since the advent of cheap, energy-efficient LEDs.
Worryingly, despite this step change in our traditional illumination of our lives, there is no formal measurement or monitoring of the change it has brought about. Our report describes noise and light pollution as the neglected pollutants. When we think of pollution, CO2 emissions causing climate change and plastic, water and air pollution all come very quickly to mind. They are all extremely important and need urgent action, but they all have dedicated central government strategies to address them.
This is not the case for the pollution caused by light and noise. It has a passing reference in the 25-year environment plan:
“We must ensure that noise and light pollution are managed effectively”.
Beyond that and the noise policy statement for England, most of the efforts to address noise pollution arise from the environmental noise directive, European Union law that was transposed into domestic law for England, which requires noise mapping and action plans to be published. However, there has not been a major policy push on noise or light pollution in recent years.
These pollutants may be neglected by government, but they are not forgotten by people. I have not experienced such strong public interest in a committee inquiry before. We had a much greater number of submissions from members of the public and campaigning groups than we would normally expect to receive. This will be familiar to local councillors and many constituency MPs, who I am sure have a very keen understanding that noise and light pollution can affect quality of life. This is a quality-of-life issue that I am sure will have affected most of us at some time or another.
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However, it is not just a quality-of-life issue. Research by the World Health Organization ranks noise pollution second only to air pollution in western Europe in contributing to ill health. The UK Health Security Agency estimates that 130,000 healthy life years are lost in the UK every year and that 40% of the British population is exposed to harmful noise levels from road traffic. While our understanding of light pollution’s effect on health is more limited, in part due to the lack of a broad evidence base, there is plenty of research suggesting that light pollution has a serious impact on the natural world, from insects to bats. We learned during our inquiry that many animals have even more sensitive circadian systems than we do, and they do not always have the luxury of controlling the light levels in their environment.
Our committee member, the noble Lord, Lord Rees, through his work with the APPG on Dark Skies, highlighted the impact of light pollution on amateur and professional astronomers and the benefits of dark skies to society more broadly. RAND Europe estimates that sleep disturbance costs the UK economy £34 billion a year, and noise and light pollution are significant factors in this. At the sharp end of the stress response, they cause not just annoyance but cardiovascular problems, metabolic effects and even reduced cognitive performance in children. Our inquiry heard a great deal of evidence about how disrupting circadian rhythms can have a strongly negative impact on mental health.
There were occasional positive notes. We heard some interesting evidence about the positive health effects of light boxes for people suffering depression and resetting circadian rhythms when the sun is not around. We urge NICE to look into this as a possible alternative prescription for mental ill-health.
Noise and light may not be grabbing the attention of central government, but they are linked to priorities around NHS mental health waiting lists, which the Government and the Opposition have said they will prioritise and which the public clearly want to see actioned. At a time when the Government are looking for public health interventions at an early stage that can ultimately reduce downstream pressure on the NHS and improve quality of life, it is worth reassessing whether there are some relatively easy wins in reducing exposure to these neglected pollutants.
One issue that concerned us was that this is a policy area that seems to fall between the cracks in government. Defra takes overall responsibility for pollution, including the environmental noise directive and the responsibilities set out in the 25-year environment plan, but much noise comes from road, rail and air traffic, which come under the Department for Transport’s remit. Much of it can be managed through planning, which comes under DLUHC, and dealing with specific planning issues and noise and light complaints typically falls on local government, as decisions to deal with them are often devolved. That means that it is not always clear who is responsible for dealing with these problems, and no one in government really seems to own these neglected pollutants.
Cross-departmental co-ordination is vital but often lacking. For example, our report suggested that local authorities should report trends in noise and light nuisance complaints to the owners of policy in central government, such as DLUHC and Defra, but we were told that this would introduce another burden on local councils. It is very hard to see how a national response to these issues can be co-ordinated if those prioritising and making the policy have no evidence of whether it is being effective. Indeed, the Government have said that they will not commit to developing metrics that would allow them to monitor light pollution. We will continue to rely on amateur surveys, such as counting the number of stars that are visible, to map light pollution in the UK. The commitment in the 25-year environment plan to
“ensure that noise and light pollution are managed effectively”
rings rather hollow, given that we have no robust way of knowing whether light pollution is getting better or worse.
We all know that local councils have extremely stretched finances and, in some cases, are struggling to meet their statutory obligations. For this reason, our report made it clear that part of addressing this problem would be to ensure that local councils are properly resourced, financially and in terms of expertise, to assess and tackle these issues. In correspondence, the Government set out that the local government finance settlement increased core spending by £4.5 billion. This is welcome and above inflation but, even with this increase, core spending power is still 11% below the 2010-11 levels in real terms, and the duties of councils have changed quite a lot over that period. It is difficult to expect cash-strapped local councils to prioritise addressing noise and light pollution—especially when the benefits accrue outside their areas of responsibility, such as to the NHS and across society more broadly—without some impetus or incentive from central government.
However, there is more good news. One of the really heartening points in our inquiry is that there are professional, campaigning and industry bodies that take this very seriously. The Institute of Acoustics, the Society of Light and Lighting and the Institution of Lighting Professionals are all concerned with ensuring that their industries do not contribute to light and noise pollution. In many cases, they have developed best practice guidance on planning and design and are passionate about seeing it widely adopted. There is significant scientific, public health and technical expertise on the causes of, and solutions for, light and noise pollution. We urge the Government to work with these organisations to ensure that this guidance and support is used effectively each time key decisions are made.
During the inquiry, we were told about Defra’s new noise mapping model. In his letter, the Minister described this as game changing. It will allow Defra and the UKHSA to get better estimates of the burden of disease from noise pollution in the UK. This is a very good first step, for which we commend the department, but we have not yet seen a clear and firm commitment to take action to reduce noise pollution on the results of this modelling.
The Government will not set a target for reducing the disease burden from noise pollution, even as they take steps to measure it more effectively. They say that a target could lead to perverse outcomes, but, without a metric for success, it is hard to know what is meant by their promise to act on noise pollution. This again underlines the lack of real ambition and sense of ownership to deal with these pollutants. We urge the Government, at the very least, to use their model to perform a cost-benefit analysis of potential interventions to understand where they rank in terms of the public health interventions that they need to fund, and to make that information available to the public. Will the Minister commit to this today?
We also urged the Government to develop a national light policy statement, setting out their approach to limiting light pollution and the responsibilities of different departments. In their response, they told us:
“Significant gaps in our understanding of the effects of artificial light would need to be addressed”
before this could happen. This was particularly disappointing as the response also rejected our recommendation to develop a programme of research to investigate the impacts of light pollution. The Government appeared to be saying both that the evidence base for action was not yet there and that they would not support the development of that evidence base. This does little to dispel the impression of neglected pollutants. If the evidence is not yet there to support a national policy, will the Minister make any commitment to funding research or assessing the existing evidence base around light pollution and human health?
For some people who are severely affected, light and noise pollution can make their lives a misery. For many of us, avoidable instances such as the grinding brakes of the Tube or the dazzle and glare from a car’s headlights are a nuisance. Both of those points were raised specifically during the inquiry. These impacts can seem minor but the evidence shows that, in many cases, noise pollution is a serious public health concern. These may be neglected pollutants some way down the Government’s list of priorities, but that does not mean that they do not impact the health, quality-of-life and levelling-up agendas, which are at the top of those priorities. It also does not mean that we would not all benefit from renewed focus and action in these areas, which have not received much political attention for many years.
The Government have developed tools that mean we are now in a position to understand the causes and consequences of noise pollution more effectively than ever before. There is considerable enthusiasm among the public and experts to tackle these problems in a co-ordinated way, but there is still a sense that they are not owned properly anywhere in government and are, at best, being tackled in a piecemeal way. Will the Minister commit to changing this state of affairs, taking co-ordinated action and ensuring that the Government play their role in making sure that we can all enjoy healthier lives with less glare and more peace and quiet? I look forward to hearing the contributions of noble Lords and the Minister’s response.