12 July 2011 | Press release
A freedom of information request by Clean Air in London has revealed that the European Commission has now approved a time extension for London to comply with legal limits for dangerous airborne particles (PM10). Environmental law organisation ClientEarth has three key concerns with this development:
• The adoption of the amended air quality plan without public consultation is unlawful. ClientEarth wrote to the UK Government in April alerting them of their legal responsibility to consult the public on this issue. The Government are relying on the public consultation on the Mayor’s strategy which took place over a year ago.
• The Government has admitted that local measures such as dust suppression and street vegetation are highly experimental with no guarantee of success.
• The Government has failed to carry out any modelling to assess whether the local measures will actually work, and has rushed through this plan before we have even seen the results of the trial of dust suppression.
Alan Andrews, air quality lawyer at ClientEarth, said: “The Mayor and the Government are taking another big gamble with Londoners’ health. They have cynically rushed through a package of experimental measures before knowing whether they will actually work, and are denying the public their legal right to comment on them.”
“The Mayor must commit to holding a public consultation on the amended air quality plan to give the public their say on the future of London’s air quality.”
“Even if they do prove to be effective, these local measures are only a stop-gap to reduce pollution near monitoring stations. This might secure legal compliance and avoid fines, but it does little to protect human health by reducing people’s exposure to harmful traffic pollution. We need tried and tested measures with proven health benefits, such as banning the most polluting diesel vehicles from inner London.”
ENDS
Notes to editors
In March the Commission approved a “temporary and conditional” time extension for London. The condition was that the air quality plan for London be amended by 11 June 2011 to include effective short term measures to tackle London’s air pollution and avoid further breaches of the PM10 daily limit value. The Government had until 30 November 2011 to notify the Commission to the changes in the air quality plan. ClientEarth wrote to the Government in April highlighting a number of concerns:
• By law, the public must be consulted on the amendment of the air quality plan
• In April this year London experienced the worst pollution episode since 2007. This showed that the government’s projections of compliance in 2011 were hopelessly optimistic (in order to obtain the time extension the government had projected that there would be 43 “bad-air days” in the whole of 2011, there have already been 40)
• These breaches showed that local measures such as dust suppression are not effective
Media contact
To speak to Alan Andrews, or to read a copy of ClientEarth’s letter to the Government, please contact:
George Leigh t. + 44 (0) 203 030 5951; m. + 44 (0)7538 418 460; e.
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