My Lords, I move this amendment on behalf of my noble friend Lord Grantchester, and with his permission.
We come to page 154 of this remarkable and fascinating Bill. Hidden within it is a remarkable backing off, if not a total retreat, by the Government in relation to the important issue of air quality. A relatively, apparently, small deletion from the Environment Act 1995 needs to be seen in a broader context. I brought this wider context to the attention of the House yesterday in Oral Questions—and I should, once again, declare an interest as the vice-president of Environmental Protection UK, although as of now I am very temporarily speaking on behalf of the opposition Front Bench.
Yesterday in my OQ I asked the Government to spell out what they were doing about air pollution, which still causes 29,000 premature deaths. We have failed to meet EU standards in the vast majority of areas; 93% of the designated urban sites are not meeting their criteria, and the WHO has indicated on the N02 front a significant part of our urban area to be in a dangerous state. That includes this city and the second city of Birmingham, as well as places like Nottingham and many other urban areas. The Government’s own forecasts in this area indicate that those areas—London, the West Midlands and west Yorkshire—are unlikely to meet the EU limit values for N02 until, at the earliest, 2030. That is 15 years after the EU deadline. Some 29,000 premature deaths requires the Government to have a bit more urgency about this.
In the Question yesterday, other noble Lords also intervened; the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, talked about low emission zones and my noble friend Lord Hunt of Chesterton, who has just returned to join us, raised the issue of diesel. No doubt we will come back to that in a moment. The noble Baroness, Lady Northover, replied, accepting the difficulties in one sense, but spelling out a range of the things that the Government are doing and a rather more impressive list of things that the Mayor of London is doing—some of which I accept.
The Minister’s colleague, the noble Baroness, Lady Northover, also denied that the Government were lacking a strategy, but the reality is that the Government abandoned the national strategy on air quality. They tried to draw up a new one in 2013 but the reaction from stakeholders was such that they had to drop it and indeed it would not have met the EU requirements. They have removed the impetus that the previous Government had towards local authorities introducing local low emission zones and the only real initiative that the Government have taken in this area is a failed attempt to get the EU to agree to the postponement of the application of the next stage of EU limit values. I was right to say that there is no strategy.
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In paragraphs 7 and 8 of Part 4 in Schedule 12, the Government are removing a requirement on local authorities to make local air quality assessments. Those assessments could have been evidence on which a broader strategy could have been drawn up. The removal of them means that there is no evidence base for a strategy, let alone a strategy at all. It could be argued that local assessments as described in the 1995 Bill are not necessarily the best way of going about this in terms of evidence or that these provisions have been rendered to some extent obsolescent by non-compliance for whatever reason, usually lack of resources, by local authorities. I agree that there needs to be a review of how local authorities are carrying out their duties in this respect. But if that is the argument and if the Government, as they claim, are serious about tackling air quality, they need to put something else in its place. There is no such move from the Government either at local or national level.
If the Committee were to accept the Bill as it stands and the complete deletion of this area, we would be accepting that there is a backing off and a retreat in this area. Our amendment does not argue that there should not be a deletion but that there should be a provision that would lead to a clearer statement of what is intended and that the Government should, instead of relying on local authority action entirely, create a framework for, for example, the delivery of low emission zones.
The dual purpose of these amendments is that we accept the deletion of the 1995 requirement although, to be honest, it would be better to keep it in than to do nothing— but it should be replaced by a requirement on the Secretary of State within six months of the passage of this Act to come up with a clear strategy on how the Government are tackling air quality. The second part is that if we continue to be in a situation
where more than one zone is failing to meet the basic EU standards, there is an obligation on the Secretary of State not just to report but to draw up a national framework for delivery of low emission zones. The majority of the problems—although not all of them—of air quality are entirely related to traffic management and mainly ground traffic, although air traffic also has an effect. Low emission zones are not the only way to deal with this issue, but they are an important one.
At the moment, we have abandoned the previous framework for introducing those emission zones. Local authorities do not know where they are on those propositions and the Government are giving no clear guidance or impetus from the centre. This would replace what was simply an information gathering process with an obligation on the Government to provide that framework for local authorities and report to the House on their overall strategy.
There was a strategy at the end of the previous Labour Government. I accept that it had been disappointing in terms of some of its delivery, but there was a clear strategy. It could have been improved on, but instead we have had effective abandonment of that strategy and this is just another little bit of the Government’s knocking out of the tools that were there to tackle what is a very real problem. I remind the Committee that this problem ends up with 29,000 people dying prematurely. I beg to move.