My Lords, I thank the Minister for his introduction to this SI. The noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, has spoken in detail about the lack of ambition and urgency in the Government’s regulations on fine particulates, and previous speakers have made powerful arguments for more ambitious targets.
I fear I feel like a single-track CD that is on continual replay, continuously playing the same track or, in my case, repeating the same arguments. The Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee, of which I am currently a member, has drawn the attention of the House to the issue of reducing concentrations of PM2.5, the pollutant causing the most harm to human health. The extensive consultation carried out by Defra drew responses on this regulation from Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, the Woodland Trust and Asthma + Lung UK, all of whom jail felt the annual mean concentration target—the AMCT—of 10 micrograms per cubic metre at the sites of the highest level of concentration by December 2040 was not adequate. The Royal College of Physicians has written to me saying:
“Air pollution and poor air quality are a significant and growing public health challenge. In 2016, the RCP alongside the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health published Every Breath We Take. This report examined the impact of exposure to air pollution across the life course.”
The report found that around 40,000 premature deaths every year in the UK were attributable to exposure to outdoor air pollution.
The Healthy Air Coalition stated that the EU Commission proposes that this same target, of 10 micrograms per cubic metre, be reached by 2030 —10 years earlier than Defra’s target of 2040. The Healthy Air Coalition also asked why the requirement for a minimum number of monitoring stations will not come into effect until January 2028. Without these stations it is extremely difficult to have confidence in our ability to monitor the particulates and meet the targets, even at their very unambitious levels. Defra’s response to the questions on this were that it expected the monitor network to be completed in the next three
years, but it had allowed for unavoidable slippage in building, networking and testing. Therefore, the legal requirement was going to be 2028.
The consultation responses from all quarters were clear that the targets were unambitious and should be higher. Despite this, as with all the other five areas of environmental targets, no change was made to the final targets. As this is the last of the six target areas to be debated, I ask the Minister how much the consultation exercise has cost in total? How many hours of Defra staff time were spent analysing and collating the responses? Given the very large number of responses—over 181,000—were extra resources deployed and temporary staff employed in order to help deal with the level of responses?
Defra spends a lot of time consulting on various pieces of legislation. I therefore imagine that the consultation department is used to the processes involved and is efficient in collating the resulting responses. On this occasion, to totally ignore and override the submissions received, and stick to the original targets, gives a very strong impression that Defra’s mind was already made up long before the consultation started. Defra was only paying lip service to the process. Meanwhile, those who suffer from asthma, bronchitis and other respiratory tract conditions, long-term and short-term, are left with no hope of improved air quality in the immediate future. That really is unacceptable. Given the level of concern on the total lack of meaningful response to the consultation exercise, if the Minister is not able to answer my questions on costs and staff resources this evening I would be grateful if he could write to me with the necessary information and put a copy of his response in the Library.