Earlier this month, four parliamentary select committees – the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the Environmental Audit, the Health and Social Care and the Transport Committees – published a joint report on air quality. They described air pollution as “a national health emergency”, and there can be little doubt that this is going to be one of the major domestic policy issues over the coming years.
And, as new rail minister Jo Johnson recently reminded us, transport is now the most polluting sector of our economy.
Happily, coach and bus operators have an increasingly positive record on the improvements being made to their fleets to reduce emissions.
Indeed, in the context of air quality, the coach and bus sectors are very much part of the solution, not a cause of the problem.
However, I’m sure we will see ever-increasing intervention by government with measures to address the issue.
Already the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has suggested there should be a new Environment Protection Agency, and the select committees have recommended that the government should establish “appropriate institutions” to independently enforce air quality requirements.
They make a raft of other recommendations, including a new Clean Air Act, a clean air fund to be financed by the transport industry, and bringing forward the date by when the sale of new petrol-only and diesel-only cars should stop (currently 2040).
There’s no doubt that air pollution is a very serious problem and is sadly the cause of far too many premature deaths.
But I was struck by the statement by Jon Lamonte, the CEO of Transport for Greater Manchester and lead board member on air quality on the Urban Transport Group, who described the select committees’ report as a “wake-up call for the government whose plans to date have been insufficient to meet the scale of the challenge that transport authorities face on air quality.”
I absolutely agree with Jon Lamonte that this issue is a big challenge for transport authorities.
But it’s a bit harsh to simply lay the blame at the government’s door.
Local authorities want greater and greater devolution and autonomy and less intervention by central government.
So what’s puzzling me is why local authorities aren’t doing more themselves at a local level rather than relying on central government intervention.
I’m sure I’ll be told that cash-strapped authorities are doing their best, but Jon Lamonte’s comment made me sit up.
It felt too much like blaming everything on central government rather than seeing the issue of air quality as a problem to be addressed jointly, in fact by all of us.
The government has a major role to play, of course. But local authorities, businesses, transport operators, individuals themselves, do to and should not simply wait to be told what to do by the government. We all have a part to play.
