Before we begin, I remind Members that they are now expected to wear face coverings. That is in line with current Government guidance and that of the House of Commons Commission. Please also give each other and members of staff space when seated and when leaving and entering the room. It is a great pleasure to call Mr Barry Sheerman to move the motion.
That this House has considered COP26 and the impact of air pollution on public health and wellbeing.
Sir Gary, it is my pleasure, on this day of all days, to have secured this Westminster Hall debate: a day when the whole world’s attention is focused on COP26 in Glasgow, and there are signs—some mixed, but some good—of what is happening there. There has also been a petition, as you of course know, signed by more than 100,000 people, calling for an introduction of charges on carbon emissions to tackle the climate crisis and air pollution. Forgive me, Sir Gary, but I am currently suffering from a bad cold and a booster jab, so if my voice fails at any time, you will know the cause.
Air pollution kills 64,000 people in the UK every year, yet the Government provide annual fossil fuel subsidies of £10.5 billion, according to the European Commission. To meet UK climate targets, they must end this practice and introduce charges on producers of greenhouse gas emissions. Most Members of the House, and especially the Yorkshire Members, know of the Drax power station, which is currently producing energy from wood pellets, either produced in this country or imported from South America. For that purpose, it received a massive Government subsidy of £900 million last year.
I want to start at the beginning; I have always believed in borrowing from the United States declaration of independence, because I love the language. I used to be the head of a university’s American studies department —indeed, I taught the Deputy Speaker at one stage. I believe that there is an inalienable right for every person on this planet to be born, to live and to breathe fresh air. At the moment, that is not the case. How bad is it? Seven million people die prematurely across the world due to air pollution-related conditions, with 36,000 premature deaths in the UK alone, costing an estimated £12 billion.
Another practical issue is, how many people realise that, at the moment, nothing in the MOT test tests how polluting someone’s vehicle is? There is nothing in the test about what comes out of the back end of a car. If the recommendations that have been brought forward could be acted on now, we could transform the quality of the vehicles on our roads. Someone gave me this information recently: if we take out the particulate emissions filter in a vehicle, or it does not work properly, that one vehicle produces the equivalent of a traffic jam between Westminster and Huddersfield. That is frightening, is it not?
We have many practical ways to change the air in our country and move towards a clean air environment. I believe that this is the secret to opening people to getting involved in the environment, to accepting—perhaps—higher taxes in order to stimulate that move, and all round, to moving towards more sustainable and greater health and wellbeing for our country. I recommend this big change in our country; let us do it now.
It is a great pleasure to see you in the Chair, Sir Gary. I commend the hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman) for securing this particularly timely debate on air pollution and its effect on public health. It is good to see the Public Health Minister in her place—sorry, it is not the Public Health Minister. She cannot reply because she has a mask on. She will update me on her role later. Swiftly moving on…
There can be little more important than the air that we breathe. We come into this world, we take those first gulps of air, and throughout our lives, it is the fresh air that we breathe that can make the difference between feeling good and not feeling good. We look for fresh air every day of the week. We want to go out into the countryside. The hon. Member for Huddersfield is right that in our country we think it is a fundamental right to be able to breathe clean air. It is important that the Government are already making great progress in sending strong messages to us, as a society and country, that clean air really matters, whether it is the commitment to ending the sale of petrol and diesel cars by 2030, or the package of measures in the recent Environment Bill.
The hon. Member for Huddersfield touched on the cost of pollution to our country—the £20 billion a year it is estimated to cost the UK economy and the many thousands of deaths caused by air pollution. One issue I want to touch on specifically is asthma and chronic respiratory conditions, which are a significant concern in my constituency, as I am sure they are for others. I have two children who have asthma—
Theo Clarke (Stafford) (Con)
I absolutely agree that it is a fundamental right to breathe clean air. Stafford Borough Council has installed the first eco-post in the country to monitor air quality. Does my right hon. Friend agree, following COP26, with the journey to net zero, that it is important to invest in air monitoring in our constituencies?
My hon. Friend makes a good point, and she brings me to the importance of practical initiatives that the hon. Member for Huddersfield touched on in his contribution. It is important that the Government are committing money and making laws and that the strategic framework is there, but unless the initiative is taken on the ground by local authorities and others, those good intentions will be for nothing.
I want to touch briefly on three initiatives in my constituency that bring that to life. Hampshire County Council, working with local schools on “My Journey” travel planning, helps children raise the awareness of their parents of the importance of travel planning, so as to reduce the number of cars on the roads. St Mark’s school in Hatch Warren has done a huge amount of work on that.
The “clear the air” Clean Air campaign, run by our local Basingstoke and Deane Borough Council, encourages people to stop idling engines outside schools, train stations or wherever it might be, and promotes awareness of how important that can be in reducing particulate pollution. Breathe Easy, a charity in my constituency that works with the British Lung Foundation, supports people with chronic lung conditions and has an important role to play. Last, but by no means least, is the work done by the county council to ensure that we help reduce road congestion by improving public transport provision.
Those are practical things that I hope the Minister might respond to, and I hope that the Government can support other local authorities, and indeed my local authority in Hampshire, to continue such important initiatives.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Gary. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman) for securing this important debate.
There can be no more important time to be holding this debate. The battle to tackle the scourge of air pollution is inextricably tied up in all the other challenges that make up the climate and ecological crisis that should be front and centre in public discussion over the next couple of weeks. If the Government truly acknowledged the scale of the problem that is faced, particularly in urban areas such as my constituency, they would commit to far more radical action.
I would like to ask the Minister in summing up to consider the following three points. First, introduce legally binding targets for the UK to abide by the World Health Organisation’s stricter clean air standards. The Government have to be as ambitious as possible. Without aiming to reach the gold standard as soon as feasible, they are simply letting the health of the public down.
Secondly, we need serious action to meet those standards, and that will require considerable Government finance. Traffic is the largest source of urban air pollution, and changes in the way we move around, particularly in cities, are vital. However, we cannot allow the cost of that to fall on ordinary people. The purchase of electric cars to replace polluting vehicles should be supported by the Government through grants and interest-free loans, and every citizen should be able to apply for those. It will be essential to continue investing heavily in public transport while keeping prices down, and to support the flourishing of active travel schemes since the covid pandemic, supporting the making of journeys by walking and cycling wherever possible.
Thirdly, the plans for a massive new incinerator in my constituency of Edmonton, which will emit 700,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year, are simply outrageous. I refuse to believe that the project would be allowed to go ahead if the incinerator were to be in a leafier, more affluent suburb. I ask the Minister to urgently meet me and campaigners to push for the Government to pause and review the project.
It is a pleasure to speak before you today, Sir Gary. I congratulate the hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman) on this interesting and informative debate.
Clean air is essential for life, health, our environment and the economy. Air pollution has reduced significantly in the last decade, but there is still more to do. We have a clean air strategy, which details how the UK will go further and faster than the EU in reducing exposure to particulate matter pollution. It sets out a goal to halve the number of people living in locations with concentrations of particulate matter above the WHO guidelines. The Environment Bill will build on that strategy, setting two air quality targets by October 2022, a target to reduce the annual average level of fine particulate matter— or PM2.5—and a further target to improve air quality. This action to improve air quality is backed up by £3.8 billion.
However, the Committee on the Medical Effects of Air Pollutants advises that a focus on long-term average concentrations of PM2.5 is the most appropriate to deliver public health benefits. That brings me to a point that fits in somewhat with what the hon. Member for Edmonton (Kate Osamor) said. I alert Members to the number of incinerators that are currently being planned or in the process of being built. I believe there are 18 along the M1 in one section alone. One such incinerator is in a leafier constituency than Edmonton—at Shepshed in my Loughborough constituency. It is near to Shepshed town centre, but it is also close to Loughborough University, my biggest employer and home to élite athletes from around the world, who obviously run about and do all sorts of things in the open air. Also 3,000 houses are expected to be built just across the roundabout from the incinerator. When I mention the incinerator with local and national organisations, they often say to me, “Yes, but the M1 creates quite a lot of pollutants already and therefore it is very difficult to monitor and understand the impact of that particular incinerator.” However, as the hon. Member for Huddersfield said, we are bringing in electric and hydrogen vehicles, which I would like to see myself, and we would like to reap the benefits of those vehicles to lessen the impact of PM2.5 in Loughborough.
Dr Dan Poulter (Central Suffolk and North Ipswich) (Con)
My hon. Friend is making a very good speech and I congratulate the hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman) on bringing this debate. My hon. Friend makes a good point about incinerators. Would she agree that incinerators have often been built to deal with the undesirability of landfill, but that has created a perverse incentive in the system? If we are going to look at issues such air pollution and clean air, we need to do that in a holistic way with other decarbonisation targets and priorities. That is what has created this problem in her constituency, and in others.
I absolutely agree. My hon. Friend could not have put it more precisely. That is the difficulty. Will the Minister consider the impact of the waste strategy at the same time as air quality? Air quality impacts on the future of our country and our constituents.
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Of course, with COP26, there is a risk of a great missed opportunity, as I believe there was last week in the Budget. If I were marking it as a university teacher, I would grudgingly give it a lower second. Why? Because I thought it was very technically competent, but it missed any true originality. That is the mark of a good essay: true originality. Originality is so important to everything that is produced. I could see the technical competence in last week’s Budget, but there was a lack of the imagination needed to say, “This is the time—with COP26 about to start in Glasgow, with all of us conscious that the planet is warming up and with the future of this fragile planet in danger—to tell the British people that we must act.”
In my experience as the longest-serving Member of Parliament on this side of the House—I was elected in 1979—the British public are intelligent and resilient, and have good common sense. We can persuade them that something terrible will happen if we do not act, and that we need extra money and taxation to so do. They are persuadable, as they have been persuadable before. They were persuadable after the ravages of the second world war. They picked themselves up and went through a period of higher taxation in order to get through. The economy grew, and so we grew out of many of our problems.
What was missing in the Budget was a Chancellor who said, “The situation is so precarious that I am introducing a number of taxes that will raise money to give us more practical ways to tackle global warming, here in our communities.” That is what was missing. That is what I want to speak about today.
Too much of the talk at the moment is global. Two or three of us here had the foresight to be the first people to invite young Greta Thunberg to come to the UK and talk to an all-party parliamentary group, and what a pleasure it was to hear her speak. However, many people think, “I cannot be Greta Thunberg; I cannot be an international statesperson; I am not the president of any country. I am just me, in my community.” We are failing to give people the ability to say, “I can help tackle this. I can roll up my sleeves and make a difference in my community,” even though it may not be something that is instantaneously registered on the global index.
Today, I want to talk about clean air, because all of us can do something about it in a practical way, and we can do it now. Let us review how bad things are. I have mentioned the cost in numbers of deaths, and I have mentioned that we need individual campaigns, yet we are still giving subsidies to companies that are polluting the atmosphere. Today, I am going to suggest some quick wins.
I want real engagement across every town and city throughout the country on a journey to sustainability based on the UN sustainable development goals. Colleagues might ask what I am doing about it as a Member of Parliament. Two years ago, we brought a group of business people to Huddersfield who joined with the university and local charities to form the Huddersfield sustainable town initiative.
My constituents really dislike it if I say we are an average British town, so I must say that we are a typical British town, which we are across almost every criterion. We are a microcosm of the United Kingdom: the percentage of people in manufacturing; the percentage of people in services; the level of education; the skills. We are a microcosm. My philosophy, which is shared by the members of the Huddersfield sustainable town initiative, is that if we can change Huddersfield into a sustainable town, there is no reason why every community in our country could not become a sustainable town. Why can we not spread from Huddersfield? We are already working with 37 towns. Why can we not have 500 towns and cities in this country work towards sustainability?
People say, “Why all that nonsense? Just get on with it. Why would you want the United Nations’ sustainable development goals?” Sir Gary, you know of my great interest in road safety. I have campaigned on it for many years: I organised for seatbelt legislation as a young MP, and in my only successful private Member’s Bill, I banned children from being carried without restraint in cars. I am now chair of the Global Network for Road Safety Legislators, a World Health Organisation committee, and because of that, I know that if we take a particular subject—even safety in a community—and put it in the context of the sustainable development goals, we transform the potential of what we are doing. The great thing about those goals is that they are rigorous. I have been involved in environmental campaigns all my life with other colleagues, and those campaigns have done really good work across many areas, but too many of them are discrete initiatives: recycling, reuse, cleaning up rivers and streams, and that sort of thing. If we have the rigour provided by the sustainable development goals, and we start off our whole sustainable development programme by consulting local people with a questionnaire asking which ones they want to prioritise, we take a real step towards engaging the local community. That is what we have done in my own community.
One of the things that we are targeting in Huddersfield is clean air. How do we stop filthy fumes from going into the air, in our case from an ancient energy from waste facility? I am not against energy from waste if it is high quality, but we have an old facility, and it does not create heat that is used to heat homes. That heat is not used in the correct way: much of it goes into the atmosphere, which is very damaging indeed, so we must first make sure that every sustainable town, city and community rigorously meets those sustainable development goals. The goals give communities that rigour: they will say, “We’ve got to this stage—yes!” but to get to the next stage and get the accreditation, they have to go one step further.
We all know that transport is critical to those sustainable development goals. Many believe that transport is responsible for 40% of the emissions we breathe in this country, polluting London and cities across the country with noxious emissions. Some great friends of mine who are Members of Parliament for Lewisham and are active there know as well as I do—because of the work we have done in the all-party parliamentary group on air pollution—about Ella Kissi-Debrah, who passed away. Her mother, Rosamund Kissi-Debrah, who I have met, had the insight and inspiration to get in touch with Sir Stephen Holgate, one of the leading professors and medical experts on clean air and its link to health and wellbeing, who works at the University of Southampton. He gave evidence at the inquest, and he got its verdict changed, because that little girl’s death was related to asthma but it was caused by the filthy pollution that she was breathing in, in a community that is just a stone’s throw from here.
All over London, we have schools; we have children; we have pregnant women; and we have elderly people. I particularly woke up during the first lecture that Sir Stephen gave to our APPG, when he said, “This is not just about NOx: it is the platelets on the NOx that cause the real damage to human health. Those platelets not only poison people and make them very ill indeed, but accelerate the aging process.” At my age, I sat up in my chair immediately thinking, “Yes!” However, that is only a lighter aside. The fact of the matter is that the air we are breathing in this country, in places where we might have thought we were guaranteed clean air, is not clean.
We have brought together a group of people in the Westminster Commission on Road Air Quality to try to do the research properly. We have an air health working party, a working party on air monitoring and a working party on education. Last week we heard from the experts on inside air, who said that where they have done audits inside schools—not just in the playground, not right by the polluting road that passes the primary school but in the classroom—the air is poisonous to breathe. If that is the case, it is time to take action, and take action we must. It also gives the opportunity for everyone to take action at the grassroots and to do it quicker rather than slower.
Yes, we all believe that we should move as fast as possible to electric vehicles, but all the research that I have been immersed in in my role suggests to me that the more we look at what is happening with electric cars, many of us believe that electric will be overtaken by hydrogen power. There is more and more evidence, in fact. Research is interesting because, with heavy goods vehicles carrying big loads, batteries are hard to use. In hilly areas, they do not have the ability to cope. Much of the research has been with HGVs, and the research that I have been privy to shows that already many HGVs are being produced to use hydrogen power. If that is true for big vehicles, it will come to small vehicles soon.
Of course, we must improve the vehicles on the road, but there are quicker things to do, too. We know that there are ways of adulterating—in the best way—the diesel that is put into commercial vehicles with vegetable extracts that make it much less polluting. Indeed, one of the people who has been educating me about that is William Tebbit, son of Norman Tebbit, who many of us remember very fondly. So this is not pie in the sky or wait a long time; this is stuff that we can do now, changing the fuel we are putting in heavy goods vehicles.