Welcome to the second of our panels today on the subject of air pollution in England. I invite you all to introduce yourselves, the organisation you represent and your particular area of interest when it comes to air pollution.

Thank you for the invitation. I am Suzanne Bartington, the independent chair of the UK100 clean air network of strategic and combined authorities. I am also an academic—clinical associate professor in environmental health at the University of Birmingham—an honorary consultant in public health, and a UK clean air champion, working to translate evidence into policy and practice. I should also declare that I sit on the Department of Health and Social Care’s committee on the medical effects of air pollutants as an expert member.

I am Tom Parkes, the air quality programme manager for the London borough of Camden. In a personal capacity, I am one of two lay members on the committee on the medical effects of air pollutants.

I am Councillor Jackie Porter, the cabinet member with the planning portfolio at Winchester city council. I previously had responsibility for public protection and air quality management, and the strategy was formed under my control.

I will start with you, Councillor Porter. We heard in the previous session about what councils need—greater powers—in order to better enforce. In some cases, for whatever reason, powers that currently exist were not being enforced, whether that is about resources, expertise or anything else. Are there any specific changes to planning powers that you believe local government needs, in order to better manage the impacts on air quality from development and, particularly, construction?

I was really interested to hear that measurement is a local issue, but air quality is a regional and national issue. Winchester is a rural district, and I have a number of points. I am conscious of the principle that new development can’t improve the failures of older development. That is a real issue. Clear countrywide construction standards—we could agree construction and environmental management plans for each development. That is simple, but the expectation of managing air quality during the development could be strengthened by national legislation. Junction 9 of the M3 is currently being done; you can see the pall of dust sitting over the city. We were also building flats to Passivhaus standards, but we discovered that the builders were using diesel generators to do it. Those are two examples. Moving away from fossil-fuelled machinery to build, or even using hydrotreated vegetable oil as an intermediate, would be a good start. We need a clear status for air quality standards. Having heard the conversation you just had, I do not quite know what those standards should be, but there is a new liveability category of DC3 in the template for the new national standards, and there is an expectation for that national standard to be the same in every development. Those are exactly the same points as have just been made. Support for those higher local and national standards would allow planners a clear route to reject, or even mitigate, without risk of appeal. That includes major developments. Nationally significant infrastructure projects do not necessarily have care for air quality from the inspectors. It is often dismissed without a word. Stop solid-fuel wood burning in all new properties by planning condition—that would be very easy to do, and it would be done. At the moment, it is still very difficult to do. There is some learning from the air quality standards. We have discovered, for instance, that the upside pavement of a road has far worse air quality than the downside when walking along it—so we could learn some quite simple things within that liveability conversation. It ties up with what Dr Fuller said, which is that there is a lot more learning to be done to find out how people use our streets. The next point is that current air quality is always retrospective. If building control standards were set at the time of actual construction and kept right up to date, as with our knowledge of the impact of air quality, then buildings would be built to the highest environmental standards at that time. That would include positive ventilation and filtration if necessary, bearing in mind, of course, that that has a cost. We have examples of old permissions for major development areas where build-out is slower—they are still building to previous standards, effectively. There is also the increased impact of air quality at height. When we build more flats, we do not know the impact on families, many of whom in those higher-level flats are vulnerable. We currently choose sites on a number of environmental considerations, air quality being one. Access to public transport is another. At Winchester city council, in our local plan, we consider both of those in our environmental management standards. If the number of residential properties has to increase exponentially, which is part of the Government’s plan for 1.5 million homes, those choices might not be possible. For instance, this year, we chose one site over another in the same village because one was further away from the motorway, and it would have affordable housing. There may not be that opportunity with the next site. Better consideration of other transport or freight operations was not considered as part of junction 9 of the M3. There could have been improvements to rail, but it was decided that freight should continue on the road—some 82% of freight is moved by road, when trains would be cleaner. We have a current local plan, which was approved in March this year and allows us to resist speculative development. Many councils do not have that, which is a risk; poor air quality impact, as was mentioned in the last session, is lost in the appeal process. The inspectors do not really deal with it as part of the process. It has to be built into such a fundamental issue that it is part of the appeal process so that there is also the opportunity to mitigate. Finally, I turn to national parks and districts. In Winchester, 40% of the district is a national park. Through local government reorganisation, we are going to be joining with the New Forest—86% of that is national park. We do not really know the effect of all that on air quality. I think that is another aspect that needs to be brought into the law.

Thank you. That was a very helpful and full answer. Given that, as a local authority, you want to ensure there are enough affordable homes—you recognise that there may be people living in very imperfect accommodation, and that if we keep applying higher standards, there is a cost attached—where is the balance between having the very highest environmental standards and making sure we are not making properties so expensive that they are unaffordable? Where do you see that trade-off?

That is the challenge, because you start to get to a point where those houses are so unaffordable that we do not build them. Winchester city council has over 6,000 council-owned properties. We have done quite an extensive retrofit of those. Being rural, we have a large area that does not have gas, so we have put air source heat pumps in those properties. It adds to the cost of living for those people, so we have also put on solar panels. Government legislation does not allow us to give those people a battery, so we have pulled out of the whole process of providing grants for solar panels, because it is only practical if you give people a battery as well. Those people also tend to say, “Could we keep our wood-burning stove, please? Or our open fire? Because, actually, we can get wood, and if it is really cold, we cannot afford those bills”. Not only is it more expensive to build them, but it is more expensive to live in them.

You mentioned that you have 6,000 council properties. Are you building new ones at all?

Yes, we are.

Are you able to build those to the standards that you are expecting?

We are building them, and we are very carefully assessing the cost of them. At the moment, the cost is extremely high, so what we have been doing is making bulk purchases from our major development areas to increase the number of affordable homes in our major development areas. They are built to high-quality standards, but not necessarily the highest quality.

What changes would you like to see to the national planning policy framework or the local air quality management framework that would help?

In our air quality strategy, we have included internal liveability. We think that is a really important point and I am glad it was brought out in the previous one. We need a clear mention of air quality in the documents—that then becomes part of the national conversation—and a clear link of developments to public transport. It is a TCPA advisory thing, but getting people on to public transport from the moment they move into those properties is one of the strongest ways of cutting down pollution. We need greater enforcement powers. There is very little about that in the new NPPF. Enforcement is almost silent. It was promised that it was coming later; it has not come and it is still very weak. We are having to negotiate with developers rather than actually being able to enforce.

Mr Parkes, you are in the local authority world, but with a different perspective as an officer rather than as an elected member. Is there anything that you would like to add to what we just heard in terms of what further we could do to support councils or how councils manage these trade-offs in a more urban setting in your case?

I completely agree with all the points that Councillor Porter has made. There is not too much I would like to add, but the point about enforcement is critical. For authorities in which we already have quite a degree of ambition for how we want new buildings to be constructed and for new homes that are sustainable and safe for people to live in, we need to be able to take enforcement action if it subsequently turns out that they have not been built to the standards set out in building regulations. I do not think we have much of a grasp on whether the new homes in this country are being built to the standards that we would expect. Even within the current set of building regulations, we could be doing a lot more to make sure that we are providing homes for people that are safe and can be heated affordably, but not at the cost of ventilation and trapping people in homes that are damp, mouldy and conducive to poor indoor air quality. An MHCLG report from 2019 looked at a small sample of new build homes in the UK, and it found that the vast majority of those tested did not meet approved document F for ventilation. We are already struggling. A lot more could be done simply by providing local authorities with the recourse to take enforcement action if it turns out that new buildings have not been built in a way that meets these consistent standards.

So you don’t have the legal powers to do anything about that, and it is not a resource issue?

It is largely a resource issue, but I am not a planning expert, so I am not entirely sure quite how viable it is to take a developer or landlord down the legal route if it turns out that they have not met the ventilation standards. It would require building control or a Government agency to do the testing on these buildings to check whether they are fulfilling the standards. If that is not happening, there is no way of knowing whether house builders are fulfilling the obligations. A lot can be done just with better enforcement and resourcing for that.

There are two aspects of that. One was the privatisation of building control. On developments, people can choose who their building control officer is. That takes away that completely independent response. On large developments, they building-control one property and not the others of a type. We had a case where the ventilation in the bathroom just went up into the loft with no air hole to the outside, and the roof literally fell in. That forced each person to take it back through NHBC, if they were actually part of NHBC. That is a classic example, but I completely agree that there is no case to be made if you have a single property. The second one is being certain that the building control person has—I think the privatisation is tied up with it. That was really a huge failure in the system—that it does not give that independent advice.

I have questions about accountability and local responsibility. My first question is for Councillor Porter. We are going through local government reorganisation, but in many areas, including my constituency, we still have two-tier local government, where you have district and borough councils with statutory duties to monitor air quality, and county councils that are in charge of transport plans and where traffic lights are going to be sited, and are the minerals and waste planning authorities. In your view, in the two-tier local government model, how is air quality monitoring data used? How is the data from city councils and different boroughs used in, for example, transport strategic planning?

I have the advantage of being a double-hatter, so—to go back to minerals and waste—I am very concerned that a certificate of lawful use for old H-size HGVs now becomes relevant for these massive, massive lorries. I personally took that to the inspection and asked for that to be included, so that old CLUs do not count when calculating the impact of large HGVs and juggernauts on air quality and the liveability of healthy streets for people. I am absolutely committed to that. Winchester is a district that will be part of the local government reorganisation. We think that this is a great opportunity for the public health aspect to be brought into the mayoral authority arrangements, because it will give consistency to the whole county of Hampshire, including Portsmouth and Southampton—a consistent quality standard for air quality. Was there another part of that question? Oh yes, I know, the third one was that, as part of the work, we are taking the strategic transport team on a lived-experience walk through a new development, because although it sounds great in public, nobody is using a bike and nobody is walking; they are all getting in their car. Something is wrong with that, isn’t it? I suppose that knowledge, which we hope to have built up from this, will be used by the department of public health, who were part of the team involved in our air quality strategy. I think that is practical, and I think that is what local authorities are really good at doing—practical experience and seeing it on the ground.

From a public health perspective, upstream primary prevention is really important. It is far more cost-effective in the longer term, too, to prevent the problems before they emerge. Certainly, that potential to place public health front and centre in the planning process has major opportunities for ambient and indoor air quality—I know we are focusing on outdoor ambient here. We talk a lot about the need to reduce emissions at source, but there is also a role for reducing exposure. We talk about reduce, extend, protect: reduce the source; extend the distance between particularly vulnerable people and the emission source; and, where that is not possible, protect the most vulnerable. That is where a more holistic and public health-focused approach to the whole planning process can give major opportunities. We hear from our local government members across the clean air network about some fantastic examples of public health leading the way in that regard—for example, the healthy streets initiative and its adoption. At the moment, however, it is very much up to them to go above and beyond the current statutory consultation process. It would be very encouraging, I think, to see a stronger focus on the role of public health and a public health-centred approach to informing that overall process.

You asked whether air quality monitoring data is used in transport planning and how it is used in the planning process. One thing to say is that even where we have a significant amount of air quality monitoring data, if we find that we are already compliant with the legal limits in the UK, it becomes a lot more difficult for us to push for developers or anybody who wants to do anything to go beyond those targets. Our ability to expect more in reducing and avoiding air pollution, and reducing exposure to it, is constrained by the conflict between our health understanding and the legal framework for air quality.

For my next question, I will start with you, Tom. How do you navigate the mismatch between local responsibility for air quality—the statutory duty to monitor it and maybe to plan so that residents do not live near quarries and/or other sources of emissions—and their limited control over emission sources, such as regional particulate matter or nitrogen dioxide, for example? Those are not under local authority control.

It is really challenging. There is a bit of a conflict as well: the more we talk to the public about air quality and try to build awareness of it, the more people have an understandable expectation that their local authority should be able to protect them when they see a source of pollution that they understand is damaging their health. In many cases, we now find that we have picked off lots of the quick wins by reducing vehicle emissions. What we have to do now is more challenging—reducing emissions from building and understanding the more niche contributions to air pollution, such as commercial cooking and the transboundary sources of pollution that we might not necessarily be able to control within our own administrative area. We need to figure out an entirely new way of approaching a collaborative method for working with other authorities, either at a local government or national regulatory level, to try to figure out what we can do. There are a lot of sources of pollution, but we have so little evidence about the specific mitigations to reduce pollution from those sources. That is not to say that there will not be solutions, but we need to think more collectively about what we can do. It is really difficult for a local authority to manage that contradiction. From Camden’s perspective, we have benefited from the fact that the ultra low emission zone has, as Dr Fuller said, delivered transformational improvement in air quality, alongside various other council schemes for reducing vehicle emissions and providing sustainable transport infrastructure. We are still seeing air quality far above the World Health Organisation guideline limits. We know that we need to do a lot more to try to better protect people’s health, but we are running out of easy options.

Does anyone have anything to add?

A key advantage of combined authorities is that you can work collectively. Clearly, air pollution does not stay within administrative boundaries, so joint working and partnerships are really important. We have seen some fantastic examples. Obviously, the Mayor of London is very much leading the way, but we are seeing that being replicated elsewhere across the country. Absolutely key is that control over national infrastructure such as National Highways, the motorway network, freight and rail; those come up again and again as being more challenging for local authorities to act on. That is where it is really important to have that local and national co-ordination. Land use is another important one: there is also a challenge with ammonia as a source of particulate matter, which again is challenging for local authorities to address. That is where we need that local-national co-ordination. There is a clear role as we see those powers being devolved as well.

Finally, what responsibility or responsibilities should developers take for air pollution beyond section 106 contributions?

There is a significant need for a more distributed sense of responsibility with developers as well. We talked earlier about how new homes are being built without necessarily fulfilling ventilation standards. First and foremost is making sure that buildings, whatever their purpose, are built in a way that satisfies existing regulatory standards but also works constructively with regulatory authorities to explore improving standards as well. The way buildings are constructed also needs to be considered. Councillor Porter mentioned the significant opportunity for a national control framework for construction machinery. In London, we already have the non-road mobile machinery low emission zone, which has been extremely effective in reducing construction emissions from diesel machinery. There is now an established market for stage IV and stage V construction machinery. Some of the major infrastructure projects are already trialling the use of hybrid machines. There is nothing to stop that approach from being replicated elsewhere in the UK. It is not that there is a lack of opportunity to do something positive, but there is a need for a coherent national framework of action for reducing emissions during construction and also once buildings are completed and in use. That will require developers to be involved in recognising the importance of providing buildings that not only can be used and occupied safely and healthily by people using them, but that also do not have a detrimental impact on the people who are already in the areas where development takes place. That is particularly important if the proposed changes to the national planning policy framework talk about densification, with a presumed focus on building new houses in areas that are already quite built up. There are already a lot of people living in such areas, potentially with already quite high exposure to air pollution, so we need to make sure that there is sufficient protection for people’s health to try to tackle the health inequality that we all know air quality exacerbates.

We took inspiration from the London principles of using non-diesel machinery; we thought that was a really positive conversation. We have material about air quality in a supplementary planning document. Supplementary planning documents will lose their value. We are going to have to find a way of entrenching this back into a local plan, and local plans are going to be templated. If you are going to template it, you need to include this in the local planning system, because unless we make sure that all these things are templated, they will not be there, because the documents are currently this wide, but they are not going to be as big. So all these things need to be templated in the national systems if we are going to get somewhere with them.

We have heard from both yourselves and the previous witnesses that the collection of data is important when it comes to judging what is happening to air quality. How are air quality monitors managed and maintained by local authorities?

Tom will probably talk from an officer point of view. Do you want to do that first, Tom? Is that easiest?

I am happy to do that. For local authorities, where there is already an understood exceedance of one of the limit values, there is an obligation to do more monitoring to understand the extent of that and to continue to monitor whether compliance is subsequently achieved. There is a fairly limited set of monitoring methodologies that can be used to produce the level of statutory data that can be compared with legal limits. The technologies are quite specific and quite complicated, so there is a relatively small pool of companies that provide the types of analysers that can provide data of a sufficient quality for us to use for these purposes. So ultimately, it ends up becoming quite an expensive endeavour. Also, the nature of the equipment means that we have to choose very specifically where we monitor, at a few select locations, so inadvertently, we do not end up with fantastic coverage of data from the highest quality monitors, and that means that there are a lot of grey areas in the monitoring network. We probably have a good understanding generally about what is happening to air quality in local authority areas that have historically been pollution hotspots. Beyond that, however, there is a limit to our knowledge. In particular, now that road transport emissions have reduced by a lot, it is a lot more difficult for us to understand the balance of what is happening from building emissions and construction emissions, and from trans-boundary pollution, which we heard about earlier.

I absolutely agree with all of Tom’s comments. One of the other challenges, particularly if we are also looking at this work from a health research perspective and we need to draw upon that monitoring data, is that there is often fragmented or incomplete coverage of data. We have particular gaps. If we look at rural areas, for example, we have that inconsistency nationally. There are also limited measurements. I know that we talked about modelling and measurements in the previous session, but those measurements are also really important for validating models, and those models fill in the gaps between the measurements. So if we want to do high-quality health assessment of impacts and understand the impacts on vulnerable groups in particular, monitoring coverage is extremely important—it is extremely important to reflect where people, including those vulnerable communities, live. At the moment, that does not really feature in terms of where monitoring is based.

As Tom said, we have expensive machines that you have to get planning permission to put in the right place, and in a conservation area that is a nightmare. We have cheaper machines that cost about £7,000 or £8,000, which are very responsive and provide excellent monitoring. There are the EarthSense Zephyr-type ones, which provide very responsive detail. You can look at them and find out what they are doing at 7 o’clock at night, and the public can, too. We also have NO2 monitors, which you attach to a streetlight, or whatever it is, just above the height of where someone can easily reach it and take it home with them. You can then get a really good sense of those things. At Winchester city council, we have that data analysed outside; we do not have the expertise within our system, or among our staff, to actually analyse it ourselves, so we pay to have that done. That is part of the budget that we have. I am told by my officers that it is a huge miss that we don’t—it allows us to publish the data locally, but the data is quite difficult to understand, and it is difficult to compare, so the public cannot compare it particularly easily. There is really an opportunity for a national database, run by DEFRA, so that everybody can see it as publicly understandable, accessible information. I think that goes back to what you were saying about the public starting to want to know. In consultations, we have never had such diametrically opposed responses: some tell us to go away, in the nicest possible way, and, “Don’t get involved in my life,” and then some say, “But we want you to control every part of our lives.” So having more and more data is fine, but we need that data to be publicly understood and accessible.

All of you have pointed out that, first of all, the equipment is expensive, and then the use of the data from the equipment is expensive and sometimes needs outside expertise. In earlier evidence today, we heard that one of the problems with using limit values is that, once you have reached those limit values, the view is, “The problem has been solved, so why would we keep on using expensive equipment and analysis when it is costing the local authority money?” Is that a common problem—that limit values are useful, but once local authorities feel that they have dealt with the issue, continued monitoring will be a low priority?

That is an incredibly important point. I was looking at the cost of our monitoring in Camden; we have an extremely extensive network of diffusion tube nitrogen dioxide monitoring, and four or five automatic monitoring sites in the borough, and the annual cost of that is about the same as two social workers. Therefore, for local authorities that are already under immense financial pressures, if they have already achieved the legal limits and are no longer legally obliged to continue monitoring and producing status reports and air quality action plans, and if they can back out of that and instead use that money to do something else that is essential in their local authority areas, it is understandable that there would be a relaxation of impetus in certain local authority areas on their work to improve air quality. Ultimately—Dr Bartington made this point—having a health perspective on why we need an air quality framework is so important, because it is widely recognised, I think, that there isn’t a safe level of exposure to particulate matter air pollution. For various different types of pollutants, there is potentially some evidence that the degrees of health effects are maybe greater at lower levels of concentration, so it is always going to be worth while doing more to try to improve air quality. Excessively focusing on limit values, as you say, really does lead us into a position of there being a real risk that, in many parts of the country, we start to lose the work that has been going on to try to improve air quality. Once we lose the monitoring network, we do not know what is happening; it could be that there is a new polluting activity, or an industry, potentially—something could be going wrong, inadvertently—but we would not know it was happening if we did not have the monitoring capability.

I will make one additional point: data is critical for understanding the most effective intervention. In being able to understand what is happening in a local area and what the improvements are actually attributable to, in terms of changes that are being made, that data is so important. It is really important to have that over a long time period as well, to be able to do robust studies that understand the impacts, for example, of low emission zones and other interventions. That data is therefore critical, and that high-quality, complete coverage of data is also really important. Certainly, yes, we have heard instances of equipment being decommissioned just because of this issue about meeting legal obligations, yet we know that, actually, we need to pursue that continuous improvement from a public health perspective.

How flexible are local authorities? We heard that there can be spikes of air pollution, on construction sites, for example. I look at some of the large construction sites here in London, and this is not for a year or a couple of years; it can be a decade. How flexible are local authorities? You may have reached and ticked the box for traffic pollution or whatever and then found here is another location we should be monitoring. Is there a great deal of flexibility with local authorities identifying those sites, and then spending money on maybe moving monitors or putting new monitors in?

This is where there is an opportunity to place a responsibility on developers. In many London boroughs there are planning conditions that require an assessment of the air quality impact during the construction phase. An air quality dust risk assessment will look at existing air quality, the nature of what is being done on that site and the proximity of surrounding people, particularly vulnerable residents, schools or healthcare facilities. If that calculation deems there is a moderate or worse dust risk, there is an expectation of a requirement for real-time construction dust monitoring on the site boundary. Again, that is something that could easily be mandated or used elsewhere in the UK. But it is effective, as long as you have the local authority scrutinising the data, and you have planning conditions or other section 106 expectations that require the developer or contractor to be routinely sending monitoring reports, and reporting when there are exceedances of limit values.

I will move on, please, Sammy. Councillor Porter, do you want to make a quick point?

I think that, in smaller authorities, this is asking a lot. I don’t think it happens. Again, it is important, going back to the whole district and the public health aspect.

I was about to loop us back to planning enforcement, and you got me halfway there. The discussion earlier about planning rules and conditions only being as good as the enforcement, rang very true to me in my experience as an MP and a former councillor, and talking to colleagues elsewhere in the country. Many council planning enforcement departments are so underfunded that they can only work reactively. I don’t know of any planning enforcement departments that are proactively checking that developers are sticking to their planning conditions at all, even reactively. I thought I half-remembered something, so I looked it up. The local government ombudsman did a specific report on how underfunded planning enforcement departments are. In many cases, the delays are so long that the deadline to take action has passed. There are effectively no planning rules in those areas because they cannot enforce it when developers do the wrong thing. Acknowledging that none of you are planning officers or in planning departments directly, I am interested in your experience of whether that is the case in your council. To me, that seems like a clear recommendation we could include, making sure that enforcement and building control council departments are funded enough to ensure this stuff happens.

Enforcement is currently a power not a duty and, therefore, it is not funded through the planning system. Even in the new planning finance arrangements it is still not there. It will always be about looking at the priorities, and currently air quality would be quite low down in those priorities. Generally, it is a matter of if a person complains, someone will go out and have a conversation and act through persuasion, unless there has been a construction management plan for a larger development, where there is a requirement. Nevertheless, we would probably still use individual measurement on that site just for a few days, not for a long period of time. I am being honest there.

Councillor Porter, you also spoke about building control, which is very important. I would like you to elaborate on the point you made about the privatisation of building control. What is it precisely that building control can compete on?

Building control can compete because a developer can choose their building control officer. They are competitive, and the councils have a fixed rate. They are also not necessarily required to check every single property of a type. They can check others. I personally have a friend who is a surveyor and runs a website where surveyors come in and bid for schemes to be the building inspector of. The only real competition is price, and possibly independence.

In reality, we know that, given the subcontracting nature of the construction industry, margins are often made by shortcuts. If you are an independent building control officer, you can also compete on the speed of the construction being enabled. That means not doing all the checks on things like firestopping between the buildings or the ventilation going up into the roof duct, as you mentioned.

I would not like to say that every single case is a matter of professionalism and the quality of the person doing the work. It is purely the system as it currently stands.

But would you like to see a system where we were back to building control being an exclusive function of the local planning authority and properly financed?

That would be a huge change that I would personally welcome, and I know my authority would too. The challenge would then be to upskill the local authorities. At the moment, the current systems and the recent changes have made it even more difficult for local authorities to be competitive in this area. That is another challenge.

I assume that we accept that building control professionals are doing a job competently and not just waving stuff through because they are getting a cheque for it. The Government are very keen to reduce the barriers to getting things built. We know that local government is constantly under pressure. Local government planning departments are sometimes taking longer to complete things already. If we move to an entirely state-run building control programme, how confident would you be that we would not just add further delays into the system?

That is why I am not querying the professionalism of the individual doing the work. I also know that it would be a challenge to the capacity of local authorities to sign off every individual house. At the moment, they often end up running the case for each individual property. It is particularly individual householders who are doing that work, not the mega builders. Encouraging large builders to look at this as part of air quality is another piece of work in itself. That is perhaps part of the conversation we were having earlier.

Would building control staff working for a local authority be better paid or less well paid than someone doing it privately for themselves?

I cannot tell.

Given the challenges around bringing building control back into local authority-exclusive control, which we have just highlighted, is there an argument for making sure that building control officers are part of a registered profession and therefore accountable to an organisation that they can be struck off from? In that case, they would have the legal responsibilities and it would be easier to make them more accountable on your part.

With my political sense I would say yes, but I think that is something to ask Mr Parkes.

I do not know enough about the building control profession to be able to make a judgment on that. From my perspective in Camden, we tend to work most closely with building control when looking at existing buildings where there are issues with, for example, the installation of solid-fuel kitchen facilities. We have experienced many cases of restaurants in Camden chucking out levels of smoke that are clearly very detrimental to public health. There is a real need for building control to have the capability and resourcing to undertake responsive investigative work in those cases, but they are so stretched that that can be really difficult. People live in situations where they are right next to really polluting premises and we are being emailed by people desperate for help; it is really challenging.

I was not suggesting that building control should disappear from local authorities in any way whatsoever; I was merely thinking of the huge volume of new builds—a registered profession might sort that.

The point about building control is really interesting, and it was brought up by the previous panel. It would be interesting to pursue that issue a little more, because we can all see that there is an experience of potential deadlock. We do not want to create a problem that houses cannot be occupied just because we have not had them checked, but we also know that is potentially a challenge in terms of quality of build and quality of liveability.

We have promised him for some time, but we are now going to deliver: it’s Martin Rhodes.

Dr Bartington, from your knowledge and experience of Birmingham and its clean air zone, what are the biggest successes and limitations there? If others are looking at introducing such a scheme, what should they look to learn from that in terms of things to introduce and things to avoid?

That is a very important question. We touched on low emission zones in the previous session, and on some of their history and background. From the experience in Birmingham, we can draw on both the research perspective and the collaboration with Birmingham city council. We know from published evidence that the clean air zone in Birmingham has been effective in reducing roadside nitrogen dioxide; that reduced by 3.5% within the clean air zone. The analysis took account of the fact that levels of nitrogen dioxide are going down nationally anyway. That is due to fleet turnover. All the time people are getting rid of older vehicles and getting newer ones and, as we heard, emission standards are improving over time in that regard. The initial focus of the clean air zone was to achieve compliance with NO2 legal limits. However, having said that, challenges remain. There are still some exceedances of legal limit values. Central Birmingham and the wider city still exceed World Health Organisation health-based guidelines, and we have had very limited evidence of any impact on particles, which are responsible for the greatest health burden in the city. To put that in geographical context, Birmingham is a city of over 1 million residents, and the clean air zone affects a geographical area of only around 50,000 to 60,000 people. Obviously, it is an important area in the centre of the city where many other people come to visit, work and so on, but looked at geographically the zone is very small in relation to the whole city. Following the discussion earlier about where vulnerabilities exist, if you were to draw that clean air zone from scratch, looking at where the greatest health burden from NO2 is, it might look somewhat different. The second part of your question, about lessons learned, is really important. It is very much the essence of the UK100 clean air network to share those experiences so that we are not reinventing them across different authorities. There have certainly been a lot of lessons learned about engagement with communities: investment in that is as important as the infrastructure that is needed to implement and monitor. That investment in communications was, in Birmingham’s case, the Brum Breathes programme. Many of the lessons learned about how to frame the messaging about air pollution and harms to health have certainly been very prominent. Finally, the future-proofing is obviously important. I mentioned that over time our national fleets are overall becoming cleaner. If we keep emission standards as a Euro 6 diesel car and a Euro 4 petrol car being essentially compliant, over time that proportion of vehicles is going to become less. To look at future-proofing the zone, clearly, we need to look at other examples of greater ambition as well—I note the Oxford zero-emission zone as one of those. There are others, including outside the UK. Clearly, to future-proof it over time is important, given it was conceived before a national ban on the sale of petrol and diesel vehicles was announced.

You said it was successful in terms of NO2. It has not been so successful in terms of particles. What is it about that particular scheme that has led to that divergence in terms of the impact?

It is an important question and that has been a focus of academic research. That is primarily because of the dominant sources of pollution. If we look in central Birmingham, where road transport is a key source of NO2 pollution, it is less influenced by those wider sources outside the city. Whereas, if we look at PM particles, there is a far broader range of sources, such as domestic combustion. We published another paper that showed that wood burning contributes around the same proportion of primary PM as road transport. So there are other sources, such as domestic combustion, industry and agriculture, which I already touched on. This was not conceived as being an intervention to reduce PM. If we are assessing it on what it was intended to do, then yes, but it was not actually intended to reduce PM pollution. Of course, there is the outstanding question about brake and tyre wear and non-exhaust emissions, which are sources of particles. Again, that is very much focused on reducing tailpipe emissions.

On your comment about the area covered, traditionally when we look at these areas we think of city centres. If the nature of pollution is changing—if you are saying there are national changes in cars and transport—should we be looking at other areas as more of a priority? Is that one of the lessons to learn from this?

It is certainly a lesson learned in terms of geographical scale and ambition. Clearly, if we look at the ultra low emission zone in London, the geographical scale, with the notable expansion to Greater London, is far larger in scope. Again, research has shown that you get a diminishing return over time simply because fewer vehicles are affected by the emission standards. On scale, to pick up on the Birmingham example, the West Midlands combined authority and seven constituent local authorities have come together to create a framework to address particulate pollution. There is a regional recognition that they need that joint working. They need to be working together and with other partners, such as us and the health service, to address that wider range of sources on that geographical scale. We are looking at a population of around 3 million in the combined authority area.

Widening out from that particular example of Birmingham and its clean air zone, let’s talk more generally about what local authorities can do in terms of the different types of instruments that they have, such as low-emission zones, school streets, the retrofit of housing and other things. I open this question up to everyone on the panel: what do you see as being the most cost-effective of the different measures that would lead to improvement?

In terms of cost-benefit analysis it is important to have comprehensive data, particularly on the health outcomes. Earlier, we touched on the example of Bradford and its approach to the clean air zone, which is a different class from Birmingham’s class D clean air zone. That had substantive public health input from the outset, and research has been wrapped around it to really understand the health impact as well as cost-benefit analysis. It has demonstrated a reduction in GP consultations for respiratory symptoms and an NHS saving of around £30,000 per month, which is significant. We can certainly see those savings, if measures are constructed with sufficient ambition and implemented well with appropriate holistic measures. There are other examples. Currently, we are undertaking an evaluation of the zero emission bus ZEBRA scheme in Oxford city. Preliminary evidence suggests it has had a major impact on NO2. Full cost-benefit analysis is still to be undertaken, but all indications are that it is a very cost-effective intervention. I will hand over to colleagues for other examples.

Dr Bartington’s point about using data is really important. From my perspective, we perhaps under-invest in the scientific research capability in the UK to make really informed policy judgments and to do cost-benefit analyses for significant policy decisions around air quality. As a lay member on the panel on the medical effects of air pollutants, I have found it a privilege to see how scientific advisory committees work in producing analyses that help to create really robust policy decisions, but it seems evident that a lot of academics are doing this as an aside to their day jobs. There are more questions that we would want to ask than the scientific advisory committees have time or resourcing to answer. That results in us being a bit blind in some of the policy decisions that we make. It is quite hard to answer the question about what the most cost-effective intervention for a particular local authority area is if we do not know the cost of doing a particular intervention. In Camden, for example, the modelling data for the London atmospheric emissions inventory suggests that commercial kitchens are the single largest source of fine particulate matter air pollution, but we have so little evidence on the different composition of mitigation strategies to help us develop a programme to reduce that in a way that supports businesses and the economy. We cannot really make an informed judgment about how that stacks up against, for example, healthy school streets, clean air zones and vehicle control measures. Finally, we have already talked about non-road mobile machinery; that is an obvious one in many parts of the country. For indoor air quality, we do not have an estimate for the total mortality burden in the UK of indoor air pollution, but the French public health authority has estimated that 20,000 premature deaths in France, out of a total of 40,000 air pollution deaths, are attributable to indoor air pollution. It is not inconceivable that indoor air pollution might have a similar impact in the UK. We need to be really careful not to focus exclusively on the outdoor environment when the indoor spaces that people spend most of their time in may still be really polluted, whether at home or at work, in schools or in other public buildings.

Bearing in mind that we were trying to get rid of NO2—that is the key point being made here—we took to having car parking zones, which we have been doing over the years. The central parking zones have gradually become much more expensive and the outer ones much cheaper, which has meant that park and ride has become more useful. We are still planning more of that. There is also the housing retrofit, which we have spoken about before. Many houses were not on gas, so they were almost exclusively using wood if they were not managing to cope with the electricity. That has been very good. We have also installed solar power and insulated those buildings, which improves the emissions outside as well as in. We are encouraging HVO, including for all our waste vehicles. Council vehicles are now all electric, which meant, in many cases, some long lead times, but that has been worth it. We have a high uptake of EV in Winchester. I appreciate that we still have non-tailpipe emissions, but from those EVs, we were one of the first districts to part fund our own EV charging points in all our car parks. That has been very well received. It is an arrangement where we can upgrade them when we need to, and that has been very worthwhile. We also welcomed a major new charging facility, run by a private company, for cars and lorries alongside the A34, which is also the E5. We have worked with other authorities to piggyback on Government funding for the Burn Better campaign. I have to say that some of the public love it; some people hate it. The two areas where we are struggling are greener last-mile delivery—we need to think again about how to do that, particularly given that it does not seem obvious in cities that are not that big anyway—and making it easier for taxi drivers to use electric cars. We have tried to lessen the demands on electric car drivers, but it is still very expensive for a taxi driver to use an electric car. These are two areas where more funding would make a difference. We could try harder.

One additional point is that we recognise that for most of the economic benefits of the health impact, it is an underestimate. COMEAP is working through a whole list of morbidity outcomes to reconsider the exposure-response relationships with air pollution, and that will therefore impact on those economic benefits. Of course, there is a cost to doing nothing, which also needs to be taken into account. Our Royal College of Physicians report estimated that, if we include dementia, the cost of air pollution in 2025 increased to nearly £50 billion. There are costs to inaction as well as the benefits of action.

I want to pick up on some points that you have each made about funding issues and how the changing funding landscape for councils has put pressure on their ability to tackle this. Councillor Porter, you just touched on some capital funding around EV chargers and private investment, but you talked earlier about the struggles around monitoring and so on. Can you talk us through your views on that and on the funding landscape?

I know that many of you have been councillors yourselves, so I am probably speaking to the converted. The funding from the Government was small; £6 million was not particularly dramatic, and it struggled to filter down to the smaller district councils. The application process was geared towards large sums, perhaps quite rightly, but that meant that, for smaller sums, the whole process was very clunky and difficult. For smaller councils, with officers who have multiple responsibilities, it was not exactly top of the list. There could have been a simpler system for, perhaps, funding for £20,000 to £50,000 plans. More funding would result in more resource. The conversation about particulates today has been really interesting, and that is perhaps where some of the resource needs to be looked at. The Government should take more of a national position on air quality, reducing the cost to the NHS. It is obvious—we have all said it—but it would be interesting to see whether the NHS sees that as a real money-saving process, and whether the Department of Health and the NHS can look at that as a joint funding outcome. We think we are able to do this work and can see the impact on the health of our more vulnerable residents, but we also know that we need the evidence from public health. There is a funding need there. We have the advantage, in Winchester, of the University of Southampton, which has considerable expertise. Professor Stephen Holgate works with us and other districts in Clean Air South. We also think there is a real value in putting funding in through that system, so that the expertise—very able scientists—is coming through to our local authorities.

That is really interesting—thank you. Tom Parkes, do you have any thoughts on cross-departmental savings or joint-funded initiatives?

I completely agree with the points that Councillor Porter made around the £6 million grant, which I think was taken away anyway. Across 317 local authorities in England, that is not really going to go very far, but we have nevertheless been able to do some powerful projects in Camden, with the DEFRA air quality grant scheme, when it did exist and we were successful in bidding for grant funding. Part of the challenge for any subsequent funding scheme is that we would need to make sure it is not just about capital investment. We have heard a lot about how providing local authorities with the personnel resource to proactively deliver projects and engage with communities, to work on policy at a local level and to set new standards for what we expect is potentially just as impactful as capital investment in, say, a suite of new electric vehicle charging points. Any funding scheme would need to be long term enough to provide continuity in bringing in or creating a role in a local authority for someone to do over a few years. That would also mean that the match funding expectation should not be so onerous that already cash-strapped local authorities are required to find funding from somewhere to match what we bring in grants. In some cases, that has priced some local authorities out of being able to apply for funding in the past. I completely agree with the idea that any new funding scheme for local authorities should take the view that we are investing in cleaner air. It is a preventive mechanism, and by having cleaner air we are avoiding costs elsewhere in the health system. We should have a more holistic assessment. For example, if we are able to reduce air pollution in our local authority by this much, even if it is just for a particular group of people, and if we had an estimate for how much that would avoid in healthcare costs for children going to the GP with asthma or missing school days, it would become a lot easier for us to justify why we invest up front. We do not necessarily have those figures, or if they exist, they are not joined up in a way that could really unlock a powerful opportunity for investing in clean air.

The Cabinet Office would say that if you could show the cross-departmental saving, you can then transfer across the budget line. I think you are talking about mainstreaming these roles under the public health function in a council, which is then back-funded through the Department of Health. Your suggestions will be really helpful when we bring together our recommendations. Dr Bartington, do you have any final points on what funding or regulatory changes would be most beneficial for councils to work in this area?

Certainly. This has been raised by UK100. For members of our clean air network, the mismatch at the moment between funding and policy cycles and the fact that we are trying to address a long-term issue is a real problem. Obviously, the loss of the DEFRA air quality grant affected many exciting projects that were being delivered, and they unfortunately could not continue. In terms of what we want to see, I spoke earlier about the opportunity for devolution of powers, certainly in the public health function. There have been some very imaginative cases of tapping into various small pots of public health money, but no consistent way of doing that in terms of creating the business case for interventions. Really, this is a health issue. Air quality is the largest environmental risk to health. It is responsible for around 30,000 early deaths each year, and it has a significant impact on people’s daily lives. Public health is ideally positioned to be able to co-ordinate and take action on air quality, but it needs to have funding behind it. Finally, we now have the tools to be better able to appraise interventions to understand their economic benefits and to create the business case. There are benefits beyond air quality. I know that is the remit of the Committee, but many of these interventions have co-benefits for noise and active travel. A third of the population are physically inactive. There is a significant economic benefit and saving to the NHS there. To tie this into the NHS long-term plan, there is clearly a need to invest in prevention, and it has the best overall return on investment.

It certainly can be improved. There are several key areas, but I will pick one. One prominent thing that local authorities have repeatedly said is that we need a co-ordinated public health campaign around air quality. If the public do not clearly understand the issue of air quality—I know that many do not because I work in this area and have done for many years, so it is bread and butter to me—it will not necessarily be at the top of people’s lists when you go out to speak to them on their doorsteps, particularly indoor air quality, which has lagged behind outdoor. As a public health professional, that is fundamental to me because it then creates understanding—knowledge is power—but also acceptance of measures. Local authorities are grappling with all these issues about disinformation and misinformation, and the public backlash is creating all sorts of difficulties with the implementation on the ground. I have certainly seen that myself. But if we have that co-ordinated national public health campaign, as we have for smoking, alcohol, road traffic accidents and so on—they are great examples—that really paves the way for action. I think that would be the priority. There are, of course, others that are important, such as long-term funding, capacity building and workforce skills development but, to me, that is the important one.

Air quality is certainly a health issue. I know that it has historically been owned by DEFRA and handled as an environmental challenge, but as clean air champions we have been very clear about it being addressed primarily as a health concern. To add to that, co-ordination across Government is critical, because it does not sit neatly in one Government Department. DFT clearly has an important role, as do MHCLG and DEFRA, but ultimately the benefits lie with Health and Social Care in terms of NHS and social care savings. My opinion is that, yes, it should be seen as a health challenge like other public health challenges, but I appreciate that is not quite as straightforward as that. On indoor air quality, there is clearly a real opportunity for that to be looked at in terms of where it sits across Government, and I know that is an ongoing conversation.

I would say it is to an extent. It is the main source of information, and it is where we find updated data ratification statistics and where we would upload the various annual status reports that we have to do. At the moment, we have a very limited degree of direct interaction with DEFRA; it would be valuable to have a greater degree of communication with Government Departments. Every local authority has a different challenge in terms of managing how air pollution affects public health. I think that the less effort there is in communicating as effectively as possible with the breadth of different local authorities in England, the weaker that national policy decisions are. I would strongly encourage a more robust approach to bringing local authorities into the process of designing policy, testing how it could work and making it more of a co-operative process. I strongly agree with the idea that there needs to be a much stronger health lens on how we assess and regulate the problem of air pollution in the UK. We talked earlier about the fact that, once you meet emission limit targets, it is easy for a local authority to switch off its monitoring and think that an environmental problem is perhaps no longer a problem. But if we think about the fact that there is still a health risk, even at levels below those limits, it would hopefully retain that sense of responsibility to continue working on improving air quality even if it has met a notional environmental target for air pollution. I think there is a significant opportunity for better collaborative working, and for involving more Government Departments and agencies.

I can only answer from the experience of a London local authority. The Greater London Authority holds London boroughs accountable for fulfilling that duty. It checks our reports, and it will pick up on any data errors and require us to make improvements or provide additional content in our status reports, so there is a degree of scrutiny. I do not know what the situation is—

Not that I am aware of. We have never had enforcement issues in Camden. I think there are some local authorities where they perhaps have not submitted on time or there has been a long delay, but I cannot say what the outcome has been or if there has been any enforcement action.

Very much so. We continue to monitor our worst air quality management area, and we are aiming for a better standard by 2030. We have gone to 30 micrograms per cubic metre for NO2 and set a PM2.5 level that we think is achievable but nevertheless challenging. We retained our monitoring of that site. Going back to the point about whether there is a relationship with national Government, I completely agree with what was said about getting the public to understand the health benefits of better air quality and the health detriment of poor air quality. It is the biggest subject that we need to challenge. A lot of people use the BBC website to find out what the air quality is like in their area, because you can put in your postcode and it tells you whether you are average, poor or good. They use that, and to have that detail well explained on the DEFRA site would be helpful. I completely agree with your point about needing to make it what I call a seatbelt moment, when the whole country thinks, “Do you know what? This is the right thing to do.” Compliance is then huge, because they just understand. For me, that is the point we have to get to. MHCLG and the Department of Health could really help with that, which would make our job a lot easier in local authorities.

All of you on the panel have said how important it is that the Department of Health should regard this with greater focus. Would you be keen for this Committee to make a recommendation along the lines of, “The Department of Health should report on the number of, and cost of treatment for, those with conditions associated with air pollution each year”?

Yes, in a word. That would be a very encouraging step forward. I have already mentioned that there is a process in place for updating the processes for health impact assessments, and DEFRA is due to update its damage costs as well. It would be extremely timely also to bring that forward as a recommendation.

Thank you very much indeed for the evidence we have heard from you all. It has been an excellent session once again.