April 27, 2017

expert reaction to ruling on publication of air pollution strategy

The UK government has lost a court bid to delay publication of its air pollution strategy, and must now release it before the June election.

Prof. Alastair Lewis, National Centre for Atmospheric Science, said:

“Solving the current problem of high NO2 in UK cities is in principle straightforward, the challenge has always been improving things sufficiently quickly to meet existing regulatory obligations and deadlines, doing this at a reasonable cost to the economy and without destabilising the current functioning of UK cities. Journeys and deliveries still need to be made, buildings heated, offices and homes constructed.

“The air quality standards that the government is trying to meet in 2020 were set some time ago, before the scale of NO2 emissions associated with diesel engines in cities was fully understood. The problem is now much better quantified and newer vehicles of all kinds are cleaner, but the scale of the urban infrastructure that now needs to be changed is vast. Even if money was no object, updating the UK’s bus, van, lorry, train and passenger car fleet to the latest technologies can’t be achieved overnight. De-NOx-ing UK cities should be thought of as a major infrastructure project for the UK, and working to deadlines only a few years may not be feasible. The report, when it is published, will tell us just how far the government thinks it can get by 2020, but it would seem unlikely that they will be saying the problem will be fully fixed by then.”

Declared interests

None declared