My Lords, I am not going to lie to the House, nor am I going to be modest: this is an absolutely brilliant Bill, and I think the Government would be very wise to accept it in its entirety exactly as it is.
I have worked to reduce air pollution for more than 20 years. I was on the London Assembly for 16 years, during which I time I pressed both mayors, Ken Livingstone for eight years and the current Prime Minister for a further eight years. Ken Livingstone took action with the introduction of the low emission zone. I also pressed Boris Johnson for action, and he acted with pot plants lining busy roads and attempts to spray the roads near monitoring stations with a type of glue that would bind the pollution to the road surface so it would not be measured. To be fair, he came up with the idea of the ultra-low emission zone, and it was so brilliant an idea that he left the next mayor to do it. I do not want to kick a man when he is down, but basically he has behaved no differently from most others on this issue.
I have witnessed politicians of all parties fail to deal with this public health emergency when in government. Year after year for the past two decades, I have seen the same press statement from Defra playing down the problem and stating that it is just about solved. Year after year, I have witnessed the Government hiding information about bad air days and air pollution episodes because it might scare the public into demanding action. The result has been an invisible killer being allowed to take victims while the Government sit by and Ministers lose three consecutive court cases over their failure to have a decent plan.
Ella Roberta Adoo Kissi-Debrah was one of those victims. She was nine years old and regularly travelled along the polluted South Circular Road. This Bill is named in her honour after her mother’s amazing fight to get air pollution put as a medical cause of death on Ella’s death certificate. Her mother, Rosamund Kissi-Debrah, is here with us today listening to our debate. Ella was the first person in this country to have that recognised, and the fact that it took a hard-working team of lawyers and an incredibly brave mother to show that it was the case speaks volumes about the official silence regarding the impacts of air pollution.
The most Ella’s mother Rosamund might have heard about air pollution from the Government was the one official warning a year, around spring time. No matter how many times air pollution went over the official limits, the Government issued just one press statement a year. In fact, they even stopped doing that after the 2011 press release coincided with a major air pollution event and made it on to the pages of all the national newspapers. It would be many years before the new London Mayor, Sadiq Khan, started putting pollution alerts on bus stops and other TfL outlets. So it was left to Rosamund’s team to dig up the information and prove that air pollution caused and worsened Ella’s asthma and was a medical cause of her tragic death.
My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, on bringing the Bill forward. I agree with her that it is a very good Bill, and I wish it well in its passage through this House. I also congratulate the noble Baroness on coming top in the ballot for Private Members’ Bills. I was not so successful, but hopefully my Bill will get out of the traps next week.
Finding a solution to climate change is of the utmost importance and must be addressed globally. Our Government and local authorities all have a role to play in that as well. Surely it is a basic right to be able to avoid having to inhale polluted air, which can cause a plethora of life-threatening problems.
As the noble Baroness highlighted, the Bill seeks, among other things, to
“establish the right to breathe clean air”.
It introduces new obligations on the Secretary of State
“to achieve and maintain clean air in England and Wales”.
It enhances
“the powers, duties and functions”
of relevant national authorities and other bodies, including local authorities. It involves
“the UK Health Security Agency in setting and reviewing pollutants and their limits”.
It establishes an independent body, the citizens’ commission for clean air,
“with powers to institute or intervene in legal proceedings”
and improve the situation.
As the noble Baroness mentioned, Ella was a young girl who sadly passed away in 2013. She has been spoken of many times in this House, and her mother Rosamund, who is present with us today, has been a tireless campaigner to ensure that other people do not suffer the tragic death that her daughter did. I have no doubt that Rosamund will get the law changed, even if not with this Bill. I am confident of that because the case is so right.
My Lords, I declare my interest as a vice-president of the Local Government Association. I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, on her excellent Private Member’s Bill and her many years of campaigning on this issue. Frankly, the first line of the Bill says it all:
“Everyone has the right to breathe clean air and the Human Rights Act 1998 is to be read as though this were a Convention right.”
In December 2020 a coroner made legal history by ruling that air pollution was one of the causes of death of nine year-old Ella Adoo Kissi-Debrah in 2013, saying that she was exposed to nitrogen dioxide and particulate matter in excess of World Health Organization guidelines, which exacerbated her severe asthma and put her into acute respiratory failure. I pay tribute to Rosamund, Ella’s mother, for her campaign to get that second coroner’s inquest and for her determination to ensure that in future others will not have to suffer and die as Ella did. This Bill is the vehicle to make that happen and I hope the Government will give it support.
Anyone who knows the South Circular Road in London, close to where Ella lived and went to school, knows how bad the air pollution can be there. Those of us with family members with severe asthma or other lung disease know the damage that can be done, especially to children’s lungs. Watching a child with lung problems struggling to breathe is one of the most distressing things that parents have to face, made infinitely worse when you know that air pollution in your local environment is making it worse. I have spoken before of my granddaughter. She was born prematurely with one-third of her lung tissue dead, and she used a ventilator for much of the first three years of her life. She lived just off the South Circular Road but has fairly recently moved away. There has been a noticeable improvement in her breathing and in general she does not get lung infections anything like as often as she used to—but there is a particular way in which small children try to draw in enough air where the diaphragm seems to disappear right up inside their sternum, and one never forgets the cough when they cannot catch their breath, especially after being outdoors on a day when pollution is bad. The frequent stays in hospital when there is an infection affects all the family, and of course there is a consequent effect on the child’s schooling, education and ability to make friends.
It is a pleasure, as always, to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, and I hugely congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, on getting to No. 1 on the Bill list and on getting this Bill going. I honour the presence of Rosamund here in the House—it seems wrong to say “congratulate”, but it is amazing how she has turned a personal tragedy into the most powerful campaign.
I am going to start with a really bad joke that is going round the States this week. It goes like this. The United States Supreme Court decision to curtail the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate carbon dioxide has drawn a puzzled reaction from the nation’s foetuses. A statement from the Association of American Foetuses expressed bafflement that the court would issue a ruling that increased the amount of atmospheric carbon monoxide, which has been shown to have a damaging effect on foetal health. “It’s impossible for us to see today’s ruling as anything but flagrantly anti-foetus,” the statement read. “To say that we are disappointed would be putting it mildly. When you consider that this has followed the decision to overturn Roe v Wade”, the foetuses added, “it just doesn’t seem very pro-life to us”. I am kind of with them on that—not on the Roe v Wade bit but on the other.
My daughter is pregnant with twins. They are 26 weeks and bouncing along; they could be born at any time. She lives in the city and she rides a bike. I guess that the twins are going to be biking, and they might also inherit the asthma that so tortured her father. We live near the Edgware Road, a site that was later found under one of our mayors to be one of the most polluted areas in the city. We spent many nights in A&E, literally waiting for the oxygen supplies while he gasped on the floor. They did not say then that it was to do with air pollution, but I absolutely know that it was. Unlike dear young Ella, he survived, but it was a really miserable experience.
The weird thing about air is that it is a bit like pumping sewage into rivers, about which we had a debate yesterday. You think to yourself: why are we legislating about this? The curious thing about the right to clean air is that, when any constitution or such things were set up, it was not even debated.
My Lords, I too welcome Rosamund Kissi-Debrah and congratulate her on all the work that she has done on behalf of her daughter, Ella. I also congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, on all the work that she has done in putting together this comprehensive Bill, and on its aims. She has done much work over the years on this issue in other Bills too, and it is a lovely idea to talk about Ella’s law.
I encourage my noble friend to consider carefully many of the aspects of the Bill. I know that he will undoubtedly support its aims and the intentions behind it. The 2018 report from four of our parliamentary committees identified air quality as the biggest risk to human health. Achieving cleaner air within five years in England and Wales is something that we would all like to see. Perhaps I have to declare an interest, in that my own mother has COPD and lung cancer, caused in part by living by a main road. Having the intention of clean air, not only for outdoor air but for indoor air—for new builds, at least, and public spaces and underground transport—would clearly benefit us all. It is difficult for us to disagree with the aims of this Bill. As I say, I am sure that my noble friend and the Government will have enormous sympathy with it.
The idea of a citizens’ commission for clean air, as required in the Bill, is a really interesting innovation, although I can understand that there may be concerns about the controversy which might be caused by its membership.
It is clear that the Government intend to act on air quality, and have already done so. We have legally binding targets for nitrogen dioxide and particulate matter, although of course our own guidelines have been lower than those set by the World Health Organization, and we need to improve on that. I was also pleased when amendments were accepted to the Environment Bill which will require legally binding long-term targets to be set. Of course, they did not specify what those levels should be, and when that Bill was going through, the amendment proposing 10 micrograms per cubic metre—which was the WHO limit—was put forward for the mean concentration of PM2.5 by 2030. But the WHO has now cut that limit to 5 micrograms, so I can see that there is a problem in setting legally binding targets that may then need to be changed by law, perhaps frequently.
My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, in particular, on her focus on clean air as a human right. It is curious how the Conservative Party continues to undervalue the great British achievement promoted by Winston Churchill: the European Convention on Human Rights. When it was drafted by the team led by Sir David Maxwell Fyfe, a prosecutor at Nuremberg and later Lord Chancellor under Churchill, Eden and Macmillan, it was designed to protect the rule of law, human rights and democracy in Europe. However, it was always intended that the convention should be a living instrument subject to teleological interpretation—not fixed in stone, but to be interpreted and updated from time to time in the light of modern needs and understanding. The European Court of Human Rights was designed to be the instrument which kept the convention up to date and relevant through its judgments.
The convention was passed and ratified in 1950 and came into force in 1953. An express right to clean air was not included. I remember the 1950s, when pollution was not perceived as seriously as it is today. Within a three-mile radius of my home in Wrexham, there were eight working collieries. I was accustomed to seeing miners, black from the pit, squatting on their haunches in the street—a comfortable position if you were working four-foot seams. They would frequently spit out the black coal dust which caked their lungs. Every household burned coal. Buildings were black. Housewives made sure to bring the washing in if there was a threat of rain to avoid black sooty streaks on their linen. Up the road in Brymbo the steelworks belched out smoke, and in Cefn Mawr people’s complexions were yellow from the acrid fumes of the chemical works.
The smogs in London of 1952, to which the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, referred, led to the first Clean Air Act of 1956. This, and subsequent Acts, did much to clear the air of obvious smoke and smoke-borne pollutants. But hidden pollutants, particulates and toxic emissions were increasingly a threat to health. In a series of judgments, the European Court of Human Rights determined that the right to life protected by Article 2 of the convention was engaged where activities endangering the environment, such as toxic emissions, also endangered human life. The European court required the state to put in place a legislative and administrative framework which would uphold the right to life—a framework similar to the Bill we are considering. If this was a novel duty, it was a valid and practical interpretation of the convention.
My Lords, it is a pleasure to speak in support of the Bill from the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, and I congratulate her on her work in this area over so many years. We have already heard powerful arguments for the importance of this Bill. According to figures from the World Health Organization, almost the entire global population— 99% of us—live in places where air quality guidelines are not met. The populations of low to middle-income countries suffer the highest levels of exposure, but even here in London, one of the world’s wealthiest conurbations, legal levels for nitrogen dioxide were breached across the entire city in 2021. The city’s pollution hotspots recorded air pollution levels 50% higher than legal limits.
The evidence is clear that poor air quality poses one of the greatest environmental risks to health. An estimated 4.2 million deaths globally are linked to ambient air pollution, including from stroke, heart disease, lung cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease as well as chronic and acute respiratory diseases like asthma. Air pollution is especially dangerous for children because of the juvenility of their brains and respiratory systems, their higher ratio of breathing rate to body size and the simple fact that they spend more time outdoors. I join others in remembering Ella Kissi-Debrah and paying tribute to her mother, who is doing so much to help ensure that no other children and their families have to suffer as Ella did.
The link between air quality and physical health is well established; it should, on its own, be reason enough to act. However, there is growing evidence to suggest that air pollution exposure can also adversely affect the brain and increase the risk of psychiatric disorders, and this is what I will focus on today. Studies published in 2019 by colleagues at King’s College London, in which I declare my interest as set out in the register, showed that exposure to air pollution at the age of 12 had a significant association with depression at age 18. The researchers reported that the most likely cause was
My Lords, I join everyone else who has spoken in welcoming the Bill and congratulating the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, on introducing it. Since everything that is worth saying has been said, I shall point out only one or two things that I believe we could improve in Committee.
First, as the noble Lord, Lord Thomas, pointed out, declaring something to be a human right may not be sufficient in the current climate, because the Government frequently redefine what is and is not a human right or is justiciable by the European Court of Human Rights. So, at some stage, I would like to find out how we can strengthen the idea that this is a human right and cannot just be thrown away, neglected or revised by a future Government. That is very important.
Secondly, as an economist, I studied the Clean Air Act 1956 very carefully and wrote about it. One thing that is missing is the polluter paying; at least in cases where we can identify the polluter and attribute responsibility for the pollution to them, we ought to allow them to be fined, not just forgiven.
Lastly, there is a role for citizens to do something about pollution; this is very welcome. The Government are allowed too much power to appoint citizens’ commissioners; we ought to find ways of inviting voluntary workers in this important area, because pollution is a problem for all of us, and we all ought to be encouraged to be policemen for it and point out that these things are hurting us all. By the time a little girl dies due to air pollution, it is too late to seek compensation. We ought to be able to spot these things much earlier and do something about them.
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My view is that warning people about air pollution and acting to keep everyone, particularly the vulnerable, safe is what Governments should be doing. The health of the people should be their primary aim. They are not, and no Government since the 1950s have taken it seriously. That is why this legislation to make clean air a human right is so essential. This Bill would enshrine the human right to clean air precisely and explicitly in UK law. It would also require the Secretary of State to assess air pollution in England and Wales and to publish and report detailed information about it, including warnings when needed. If noble Lords are in any doubt about the seriousness of the issues I am raising, please spend a few minutes talking to Rosamund, who is prepared to meet any and all noble Lords. She will explain exactly what happened to her daughter and why it is so important that this Bill passes.
Importantly, the UN Human Rights Council adopted a resolution on 8 October 2021 that acknowledged the importance of a clean, healthy and sustainable environment as critical to the enjoyment of all human rights. The UK Government voted in favour of that resolution, as I hope they will again when it comes before the UN General Assembly later this month for adoption globally.
In order to ensure independent scrutiny and continuous improvement, this Bill establishes a citizens’ commission for clean air, which would review annually the Secretary of State’s compliance with this Bill during the previous calendar year and advise the Secretary of State if any methods should be improved from the start of the subsequent year.
Importantly, the Bill deals with indoor pollution in new developments, the Underground and buildings regularly accessed by members of the public, including children. Crucially, it updates the Government’s targets by basing them on the best international advice, including the World Health Organization’s latest air quality guidelines. It would also push the Government and public authorities to act on the Climate Change Committee’s advice. Another big innovation in my Bill is that it follows a “one air” approach that encompasses the health and environmental impacts of air pollutants and greenhouse gases.
I can understand the Government’s reluctance to spend money or impose regulations, but the costs of dealing with this public health emergency are very similar to the costs of solving the climate crisis, because it is the same crisis and both are heading towards a zero-emission solution. In fact, my Bill offers the quickest, cheapest and most effective way to transformative action to address the UK’s largest environmental health risk. Overnight, public authorities would simply have to consider air pollution, including greenhouse gases, in every decision, in the way that equalities are currently considered. Some public authorities are beginning to do something similar when they apply a climate lens when taking decisions, but it will not be enough without this Bill.
I have seen the medical evidence accumulate regarding the benefits to our health and the NHS finances of taking action on air pollution: the link with long-term conditions such as heart conditions, lung damage, organ failure and Alzheimer’s. The more the scientists look, the more dangers they find from polluted air. These cost the NHS money and bring tragedy to families. If the Government take action on emissions, not only do they save lives but we help save the planet, which is why this green agenda makes so much sense.
The Environment Agency and Climate Change Committee would be required to review the pollutants and limits annually and advise the Secretary of State if they need tightening. The standards may be only tightened, not loosened. This legislation has a vision of a cleaner future and a modern approach to how we achieve that. It would support continuous improvement on an annual basis.
The Bill requires new regulations to enable the sale of appliances generating wholly renewable energy and enables energy efficiency improvements that reduce energy use and emissions of greenhouse gases. Part of this approach is to restrict the sale of combustion appliances that emit pollutants to the air, including wood-burning stoves. If the Bill becomes law, I will happily get rid of my partner’s wood-burning stove.
In passing, I thank the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee for scrutinising my Bill and confirm that I am willing to propose amendments to the Bill to address its three recommendations. In essence, these amendments would align parts of the Bill relating to the tightening of future standards more closely to mechanisms in the Climate Change Act 2008 that require the Secretary of State to comply or explain to Parliament.
A lot of the responsibility for current clean air action falls to mayors and public authorities, yet they do not have the powers and resources to match that responsibility. The Bill seeks to change that by giving duties and matching powers and resources to national and local authorities, including metro mayors, to achieve clean air within five years, with annual reviews thereafter.
Finally, my Bill also has teeth. Where the Secretary of State or others have not achieved clean air by this deadline, nor otherwise complied with their duties under the Bill, the citizens’ commission for clean air may issue a notice requiring them to comply with their duty, take specific steps to achieve compliance and provide written information on the steps taken, or proposed to be taken, for the purpose of complying with their duty. This citizens’ commission for clean air is the new organisation set up to support people such as Rosamund by helping them to get justice via the courts.
The citizens’ commission for clean air may apply to the court for an order requiring a Minister to comply. The Bill would also allow it to institute or intervene in legal proceedings if relevant to the duty to achieve clean air. My Bill therefore proposes a practical and proportionate approach to enforcement. All this is underpinned by fundamental environmental principles that must be followed.
I give your Lordships a Bill that is detailed and comprehensive but, above all, necessary. If we could pass this Bill, Ella’s law, before the 70th anniversary of the great smog in December this year and the 10th anniversary of Ella’s death, on 15 February 2023, I think the country would thank us. It is too late to save Ella, but I hope this Bill will honour her memory.
I grew up in south London—I lived in Southwark and Lewisham—so I spent many years travelling around the South Circular. It is certainly an area that is very polluted. It was reported that it was the eighth worst area in Great Britain for pollution. In the landmark case following Ella’s death, hers was the first death officially caused by air pollution, which clearly states the severity of the environmental situation in that part of south London.
But this is a matter that we can do something about. We can improve the situation. If pollution is lowered by one microgram per cubic metre, then in 18 years 50,000-plus cases of coronary heart disease, 16,000 strokes, 9,000 cases of asthma and 4,000 cases of lung cancer could be prevented. Combined, that amounts to 27,000 additional years of life in the UK alone with proper action, and 1,900 premature deaths prevented—the population of a small urban area. Surely this is a call to action that every noble Lord in this House can take up.
None of us is safe from these pernicious particles. We are at risk at every stage of our life. A child born into polluted air may have a low birthweight and can develop asthma, coughs and wheezing or simply not develop well as a child. Then as an adult there is the risk of diabetes, chronic bronchitis and other terrible illnesses. As we become older again, there is the risk of diabetes and heart disease. Surely that is a life that we do not want anyone to have to live.
The impact is not only on public health but also on the public pocket. It has been found by the Environmental Audit Committee that health problems can cost the country £20 billion a year, money that would be better spent on lives better lived. In 2013, the year of Ella’s passing, we saw the NHS spend £1.8 billion on respiratory ailments and £2.3 billion on cardiac illnesses. One heart transplant costs £44,000. Imagine how that money could be spent if we addressed this issue with prevention. We could save people’s lives and help them live better lives. We can do better.
The Bill would hold someone responsible for the crisis, allowing for additional scrutiny through the presentation of action and justification to Parliament. It could keep approximately 2,000 people alive longer. Each year between 28,000 to 36,000 people die as a result of air pollution. We must do something about this.
There is light at the end of the tunnel. In 2015, 1.3 billion kilograms of air pollutants were removed from the atmosphere of the UK. This saved around £1 billion to the UK public purse, due to less activity having to be taken in terms of respiratory illnesses in hospital.
As I say, I grew up in Southwark. The noble Baroness mentioned the health of the people. Outside the town hall in Southwark, which I know well, there is a sign that says:
“The Health of the People is the Highest Law”.
That was put there in the 1930s, and it is as relevant today as it was then.
Mention has also been made of smog. My mum always tells me about when I was born, coming home with me from Lambeth Hospital at Elephant and Castle through the smog, and how awful it was for my dad coming to see me in the hospital. I do not remember the smogs at all but in the 1960s they were here. However, the Clean Air Act improved things dramatically. We have more to do again now. This is a serious problem but the Government can act.
I hope the Minister will be able to give us some good news about support for the Bill. If we do not get that, I am sure Rosamund will still make this happen, but I hope the Government can support the Bill and that it has an easy passage through this House.
In 2016 the Royal College of Physicians alongside the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health published Every Breath We Take, a report that examined the impact of exposure to air pollution across the life course. While the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, said he thought deaths were around 25,000 to 30,000, the report says that around 40,000 premature deaths every year in the UK are attributable to exposure to outdoor air pollution. The health problems resulting from exposure to air pollution have a very high cost to our health services and businesses. In the UK, these costs add up to more than £20 billion every year. People from lower socioeconomic backgrounds tend to live in environments where they are more exposed to air pollution and therefore suffer much more from the effects of exposure to high levels of air pollution.
This is a public health emergency, and the public health response to air pollution should always be about protecting humans and the environment in ways that are socially inclusive and equitable globally and across multiple generations. After the death of Ella, the coroner’s prevention of future deaths report outlined that legally binding targets based on the World Health Organization guidelines would reduce the number of deaths from air pollution in the UK. I therefore ask the Minister whether, following the Government’s current consultation on targets under the Environment Act 2021, they will set ambitious targets to reduce PM2.5 to 10 micrograms per cubic metre by 2030, with the ultimate objective of reducing annual mean concentration to five micrograms per cubic metre in line with the WHO air quality guideline values published last year.
Above all, can the Government please lead from the front? Many parts of our public sector need to be involved if we are going to make this happen, including local government and primary care as well as our hospitals and, most importantly, those involved in the environment so that we can reduce the damage that this pollution is doing to many people in this country.
There is a case going through in America called Juliana v United States, which involves a group of young people taking on the American Government to demand the right to clean water, clean air and a clean environment. The Trump Government managed to knock this back at every turn of the screw. A friend of mine, who is an academic, was asked to stand up and talk about clean air. She made the point that when the founding fathers wrote the constitution of America, no one assumed that you would ever have anything but clean air—it was just an assumption. Why do we have to legislate for something that is humanity’s right, as the Bill of the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, points out?
I want to make one specific point about something I am pleased to see in the Bill. Clause 8 excludes biomass and wood from the definition of renewable energy. I welcome the fact that this definition would exclude generating electricity from wood pellets, as we do in the UK with companies such as Drax. I have spoken about Drax before and am going to again, briefly. Drax is currently classed as a type of energy generation that is renewable, but Drax’s power plants are the most polluting sites in Europe. Drax is the single largest source of CO2 emissions in the UK, according to Ember, and the fourth largest emitter in the EU among coal plants. However, we do not count these as carbon emissions due to their classification as renewables and the fact that the trees which were harvested to feed the power plants could, theoretically, be regrown.
Furthermore, the emissions that we produce in the next 30 to 60 years are those which are going to have the make-or-break impact on the warming of the planet. If you look at the info from Drax itself, you see that the emissions from biomass being burned today will not be fully offset, according to analysis by the MIT Sloan School of Management, until 2140. That is a long payback. Biomass pellets produce emissions all along the supply chain: they are harvested, transported, dried and processed, and then transported to Yorkshire. As MIT said, it is actually better to burn coal at source, because the coal is at least dry.
The post-2027 future is wholly dependent on a technology which does not currently operate at a scale even close to what is required—carbon capture and storage. If Drax gets its way and expands its production, we could end up using our entire government budget to offset for biomass while simultaneously subsidising it at £1 billion a year. We are locked into contracts until 2027. If we can get the Bill of the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, into place long before that, that would be one of the many things that will not happen. I thoroughly support the Bill and absolutely congratulate her.
Can my noble friend say what the impact on the environment would be of having 5 micrograms per cubic metre as the target, as well as the costs involved and the practicalities of introducing it? When might we get a reply to the consultation that closed on 27 June? I know that the Environment Act requires us to decide on targets by October but, as I say, I can understand that the extent of the changes required by this Bill could be a step slightly too far for my noble friend and the Government, who I know share the aims.
I would like to ask a couple more questions. Will the Government consider much more regular, and more public, warnings about air pollution, so that those who are at risk can have a better chance of protecting themselves? Are there other measures that the Government might propose that would fulfil the aims of this Bill, which I obviously support?
Similarly, toxic emissions were held to engage Article 8, the right to respect for private and family life. Where pollution levels exceed safe limits near a person’s home, European judges decided there was a violation of Article 8 on the ground that such pollution makes that person more vulnerable to various illnesses and adversely impacts his or her quality of life.
If we ever get to debate the British Bill of Rights, we will find Ministers arguing that we ought not to have new duties thrust upon us by foreign judges. However, this Bill, in light of the recent decision of the United Nations Human Rights Council, comes at precisely the right time to introduce explicitly into our domestic law the right to breathe clean air. Indeed, Clause 1(1) states:
“Everyone has the right to breathe clean air and the Human Rights Act 1998 is to be read as though this were a Convention right.”
This is putting into the European convention an explicit reference to clean air.
Science does not stand still, nor does human behaviour. If we want to make some amazing advancements in tackling pollution, we need to fund technology and scientific research to find new solutions. This transformative Bill provides the vehicle for such advances and the machinery to monitor and update its standards. It provides for an agency to take the lead in judicial review or other proceedings to enforce its requirements. Finally, we must always bear in mind that we must take people with us. Measures to reduce pollution may cause large societal changes and unforeseen consequences that we must expect, but the Bill is an important step forward.
“pollutant particles small enough to cross the blood-brain barrier, causing inflammation in the brain, which is known to link to the development of depressive symptoms”.
Children living in the top 25% most polluted areas were three to four times more susceptible than those living in the 25% least polluted areas.
The researchers’ most recent study from 2021 showed that youth in the general population across England and Wales who were exposed to high levels of outdoor air pollution during adolescence were more likely to develop mental health problems as they transitioned to adulthood. Worryingly, the researchers found this across the spectrum of mental health problems: depression, anxiety, PTSD, ADHD, conduct disorder, eating disorders and psychosis. This suggests that exposure to polluted air at this critical stage of brain development is a non-specific risk factor for mental ill-health.
A further study last year among residents in south London demonstrated increased use of mental health services, both in-patient and out-patient, in people recently diagnosed with psychosis and mood disorders. The cost of this to the NHS, never mind the personal cost to the individual, is significant. A recent report from the Mental Health Foundation and the LSE put the annual cost to the UK of mental health problems at around £118 billion.
There are many good reasons to clean up the air that we breathe: reducing deaths from the physical harms caused by pollution and improving the health of the planet are high among them. But the growing evidence of causality between air pollution exposure and psychiatric disorders indicates that interventions to improve air quality, such as those that the Bill proposes, could also play a role in improving mental health prognoses and reducing associated healthcare costs. This suggests just one more reason why the noble Baroness’s Bill makes good sense, and I am happy to offer it my support.