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UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 229-i

House of COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE

ENVIRONMENTAL AUDIT COMMITTEE

 

 

AIR QUALITY

 

 

Tuesday 5 January 2010

MS ISABEL DEDRING and MR SIMON COUSINS

Evidence heard in Public Questions 1 - 26

 

 

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Oral Evidence

Taken before the Environmental Audit Committee

on Tuesday 5 January 2010

Members present

Mr Tim Yeo, in the Chair

Mark Lazarowicz

Jo Swinson

Dr Desmond Turner

________________

Memorandum submitted by the Mayor of London, GLA

 

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: Ms Isabel Dedring, Mayoral Adviser on the Environment, and Mr Simon Cousins, Environment Programme Officer, Greater London Authority, gave evidence.

Q1 Chairman: I should just draw attention to my entry in the Register of Interests. I chair a company which distributes and services London taxis, which may be relevant to the problem of air quality in London. Could I ask, to start off with, what do you think has led to the situation where we are over the limits for particulates and nitrogen dioxide and ozone in quite a number of locations in London?

Ms Dedring: I just wanted to explain that I have sent round an A3 piece of paper, and apologies for sort of dumping that on you and I know that it looks possibly uninteresting or complex or both, but this is quite a technical issue and I just wanted to explain what it is because it may help inform the discussion, or feel free to ignore it. I am looking at the side of the page where it says "PM10" and it basically shows where the PM10 violations are in London to give a sense with particulate matter, and apologies to those of you who know all of this, but for those of you who do not, it is more like dust, it is little bits of things like rubber, dirt, and it can come from exhausts and it can also come from things like tyre and brake wear or from non-transport emissions. Underneath the graph it shows the expected reductions in PM10 that we are modelling as a result of the Mayor's draft Policy Strategy, which we can come on to later, and then the thing on the right shows the actual source of this, so where does PM10 come from in the first place. It may just be helpful because, when you then compare that to NO2 which is the other big pollutant of concern in London, the distribution of it is entirely different, it is much more widespread, and the sources of it, which is that thing again on the right, that bar, again it is quite different, so some of the key distinctions are with NO2 that a lot more of it comes from buildings and gas consumption in buildings rather than more purely from the transport side of things. The last thing that is just worth noting is that what this does not include is emissions from outside London, so on PM10 40 per cent of emissions in London come from outside London, which just further makes the problem intractable, and that is not shown on this graph, and for NO2 it is about 20 per cent. It is just maybe useful as a reference in the course of the discussions. Going back to your question, I think the first issue is that, if you look, for example, at the European limit values, which were announced quite a while ago now, at no level of government was an effort undertaken to say, "Here's where we are now, that's where we need to be and here's a set of measures that we are all going to take, local, regional and national government, in order to actually get us from point A to point B", so there has been the one good movement in the right direction. Certainly in London we have seen major improvement certainly since the 1950s and even since ten years ago due to a range of things the Government have done and the London Government have done, but there just has not been that kind of, "Actually, here's the gap and, therefore, here's what we need to do to fill that". Now, coming into it quite late in the day ourselves, it is quite difficult to take action in a way that looks quite unfair and imposes a very significant financial burden, so those are some of the trade-offs that we need to make, but obviously it is something that we need to tackle because of the health implications primarily. The only other thing to say on that, I think, is that the easiest way to resolve these issues is through improvements in Euro standards basically at the European level, and certainly we would say that those standards need to be coming in faster and they need to be more stringent, and there is a lot of lobbying that goes on by manufacturers. For example, right now we are trying to set Euro standards on LGVs and the manufacturers are trying to get the deadline pushed out as far as possible and they are trying to get the standard not set so tight. Given that the replacement of the fleet is going to be the single most effective way to tackle this problem, then making sure that the newer vehicles are higher-standard vehicles as quickly as possible, the easiest way to do that is at the European level, but obviously, in the absence of that, we need to take action in addition, and that is something we would want to do anyway, so I think that is the kind of unfortunate situation that we are in at the moment.

Q2 Chairman: Just one thing that comes straight out of PM10, and it is a very interesting chart, is that the list on the right-hand side which shows the contributors, most of which are vehicles of one sort or another, in almost every category the contribution of the exhaust is much bigger than the tyre and brake wear, including HGVs, LGVs, buses, et cetera, et cetera, taxis and motorcycles. The one exception to that pattern is cars where the contribution of tyre and brake wear is much higher than the exhaust. Is that because the engine standards for cars are much more stringent than they are for any other category?

Ms Dedring: Yes. Basically, on the smaller vehicles the Euro standards come in first and then over time the bigger vehicles get the Euro 5 or Euro 6 standard, so one issue obviously is to accelerate that as quickly as possible, but yes, that is the primary reason for it. It is just that the average standard of the car fleet is higher basically.

Q3 Chairman: Given that you have identified the Euro standards as one of the key ways in which progress can be made, does that mean the scope for decisions by the GLA directly to reduce air pollution by various measures, is that scope fairly limited in fact?

Ms Dedring: Our view on PM10, just as a starting point, is that this problem exists in London, therefore, we are going to tackle it. NO2 is the same thing, but NO2 is much more widespread, so, if you look over the coming years, already there are hundreds of cities in the UK that would have unacceptable levels of NO2 and that is going to improve over time, but there will still be dozens of cities over the next decade that we are now in which will still have NO2 problems, so, forgetting political will or anything like that, it is not really efficient for London to tackle the problem and Birmingham and Manchester and each to do it individually. Imagine you are an individual vehicle owner or you are a fleet operator, you are driving from city to city, the standards change everywhere, and imagine hundreds of little LEZs all over the country, it is just not logic, but obviously, if action is not taken at a national level, then that is the kind of thing that we would be needing to look at ourselves. We just do not think that that is really where we want to end up because it just does not make any sense. Having said that, in the Mayor's Strategy, we have put in a number of measures on NO2 which we think are quite significant and we are sort of arguing that that might be something that the Government could roll out to other cities. For example, the Low Emission Zone does not tackle NO2, it is specifically focused on particulate matter, so we are proposing an extension of the Low Emission Zone to cover NO2 as well, but again we are simultaneously saying to Government, "It doesn't make sense for us to do this on our own, given that you have got the problem in other cities as well", so we would be very keen to get some assurance that at a national level the approach taken will be X and then we would do something which would be in conformity with that. Things like the Low Emission Zone, in effect, accelerate the Euro standards. They do not do something that is different from the Euro standard, it is just churning the fleet over faster than it would otherwise have turned over, so action can be taken at any level, but it would be easier to do it in the first place when the things roll off the line because there are obviously significant compliance costs associated with that and people buying vehicles which, subsequently they discover, they should not have bought or they should have bought a newer version, and that is one of the unfortunate consequences of trying to accelerate some of the standards.

Q4 Mark Lazarowicz: Just on a factual point, you mentioned that 20 per cent of PM10 comes from outside London?

Ms Dedring: Forty per cent. It changes over time, having said that.

Q5 Mark Lazarowicz: Where are they coming from in broad terms?

Ms Dedring: It can be anywhere. It can be as far as Saharan dust, it can be northern Europe sort of agricultural activity, it can be industrial activity in southern England and northern Europe, so it is very much subject to meteorological conditions. That is one of the difficulties with tackling PM10 because, unlike NO2, it is much spikier, so it has these sorts of episodes where suddenly it sky-rockets which you will typically see when you have got your hot, still days, so, given that it is small bits of dust basically, when there is not that much wind, it builds up and particularly will build up in urban environments where we have these sorts of street canyons and traffic going through those accumulate it.

Q6 Mark Lazarowicz: Presumably, just as PM10s are coming into London, also they are being exported out of London as well at certain places.

Ms Dedring: Yes, it is a very poorly understood area and it is one of the issues. Even just understanding the breakdown of these things and where they are coming from in the first place, it is a sort of whole discipline unto itself with a lot of uncertainty around it, and that is one of the issues around this. An interesting aspect of that lack of understanding is that, given the measures that have been put in place in London over, say, the last ten years, and I do not just mean by London Government, but generally, you would expect to see a much bigger reduction in NO2 and PM10 than you have seen, and again that is something people do not really understand. Here are these new Euro standards coming in and there are various things which have been implemented, but NO2 is not reducing at the rate that it should be reducing. There has been some discussion recently about the performance of Euro standards in reality versus the way that they perform on a test track. All of these things are actually just ammunition to say, "Oh, we shouldn't do anything", which is exactly what needs to not happen, and that is one of the challenges with this agenda.

Q7 Mark Lazarowicz: But, nevertheless, there must be danger in adopting prescriptions which actually are not soundly based on the science?

Ms Dedring: Yes, we need to base it on everything that we know at the time and it is just that it is well-recognised now that, for some reason, we are not seeing the reductions that we need to see and there is a lot of speculation about why that is, but there is not a 100 per cent understanding of it. Our own view is that we need to carry on tackling the problem and hope to resolve those issues in parallel because we cannot say, "Oh, right, let's just stop doing anything, bottom out what is going on and then we'll start again" because nobody wants to be in that situation of just losing three years, especially given the speed at which public sector organisations work.

Q8 Dr Turner: I am just curious, given the abundance of buses in London traffic, you're your breakdown of the contributions to PM10 and to NOx which are attributable to bus and coach exhausts is relatively small. I can remember, two or three years ago we visited Stockholm where the entire city bus fleet had been converted to alcohol with dramatic effects in reducing both particulates and NOx levels in the city, so it rather looked as if buses were a very key element in both these pollutants, yet they do not seem to figure very much in your breakdown. I find this confusing and perhaps you could explain that.

Ms Dedring: One reason is that the buses have to meet the Low Emission Zone standards, so they all have traps on them now, so on the PM side you would see a much higher number if you had looked ten years ago or five years ago, so on the PM side, because they have these particulate traps retrofitted to them, you would be seeing a much lower level of PM than you might otherwise see. The other thing is that it is a relatively new fleet because there has been so much investment in the bus fleet, so now you are seeing that about half of them, I think, are Euro 3 and about a third are Euro 4, but what we have said in the Strategy is that we would be looking to convert all the buses to Euro 4 by 2015 because having the traps helps on PM, but it does not do anything for NO2 particularly, so that is one thing we are doing. Also, we are converting the whole bus fleet to hybrid which has about 30/40 per cent lower emissions across the board, CO2, NO2 and PM, compared to a standard diesel vehicle, so that will be above and beyond the Euro 4 performance, so it will be a Euro 4+ hybrid, and the new bus for London, the new Routemaster will be hybrid as well. All of that is actually going to help improve the situation, but on NO2 it is still quite significant, and that is in the baseline, which is why we have suggested that all buses need to be Euro 4 because, when you actually look at its contribution on the NO2 side, it is bigger than it should be relative to the volume of traffic that it represents.

Mr Cousins: Also, it is especially bad in central and inner London where there are so many vehicles.

Q9 Dr Turner: Sorry?

Mr Cousins: It is especially bad in central and inner London for NOx emissions from buses, so that is why we ---

Q10 Dr Turner: You only have to stand next to one!

Ms Dedring: It is just worth saying that we are doing a review of the bus network and looking at some of those classic examples that people always give, like Oxford Street, and do we really need all those buses going down Oxford Street.

Q11 Dr Turner: What do you think are the key measures that you can take to improve London air quality to achieve the targets that you are looking for?

Ms Dedring: We have structured a lot of the Strategy so that, as a bare minimum starting point, we have got to get compliant with European limit values because those are set off of health standards and, if we are not compliant in certain locations, that means that we are exposing Londoners to health risks in those locations, and that is not okay, so we need to tackle the problem more broadly and see improvements across the board, but first the priority has got to be those areas where people are exposed to unnecessary and unacceptable levels of risk. The reason I am mentioning that is that on the PM side those limit values, the time has passed already for tackling them, so we have focused on measures that are short-term in terms of things that can be delivered quickly basically and that includes things like focusing on hot spots particularly, so it includes things like routing the cleaner buses down the hot spots, changing the road layout at hot spots, smoothing traffic flow in those locations, potentially looking at traffic diversions around those locations and restricting access to some of the roads potentially, so that would be things like reducing the entry and exit points from the road to actually reduce traffic flow on the road in those particular locations. I think, broadly speaking, getting away from the specifics of PM10 over the next couple of years, first of all, we have to look at our own fleet, and that is things like buses, and the fleets that we indirectly affect, but more directly, say, than cars, so that would be things like cabs. There are more than 20,000 black cabs and more than 40,000 minicabs and the minicabs are actually relatively very clean, but you could create further incentives for them to be greener. Then we can use things like the Congestion Charge and other measures on cars specifically, and then we are also looking at extensions to the Low Emission Zone, as I said earlier, on the bigger vehicles, but at the same time at the national level there are measures which are actually cutting against some of these things. For example, for CO2 reasons, there is an incentive to buy diesel vehicles which has been quite effective and about 30 per cent of new cars sold now are diesel versus eight per cent a few years ago, but diesel vehicles tend to be the worst from an air pollution standpoint, so it was all put in for the right reasons from a climate change perspective, but from an air pollution perspective not a good outcome, so there are some of those perversities that need to be resolved.

Q12 Dr Turner: Talking of perversities, there seem to be two things which the GLA is doing which do not seem to be helpful. One is to delay the implementation of Phase 3 of the Low Emission Zone, and the other is to remove the western Congestion Charging Zone. You have just prayed in aid the effect of the Congestion Charge. How do you explain those apparently contradictory moves?

Ms Dedring: On WEZ, it was an election commitment of the Mayor to consult on it and that consultation is still ongoing, so we will see what happens, but one of the things that we are considering as part of the consultation is exactly what the air quality impacts are going to be, and that is part of that exercise, so the details of that are not available yet. It is worth saying that obviously on a London-wide level, WEZ, the western extension, has an undetectable impact, but obviously on certain roads it has more of an impact when you just look at the local areas. The traffic impact of the western extension was never as significant as it was for the central zone and it was always much more of a revenue-raising device than really a traffic management measure and certainly than an air quality measure, so a combination of those things means that the impact, in our view, is quite small even if you look at those areas. Again, that is something that we are looking at in the course of the consultation and obviously one wants to be clear about what the specific impacts are. On the Low Emission Zone, interestingly, Phase 3 of the Low Emission Zone which tackles LGVs, the sort of 'white van man', it is very different from the first two phases which were about basically large lorries, fleet operators, so the ability of them to adapt and prepare for the requirements that the Low Emission Zone placed on them was quite different from a sole trader with a van, and at the time that it was meant to be coming in was in the depths of the recession and, literally, the cost of retrofitting those vehicles or buying new vehicles would have bankrupted a lot of these people, so at the time we felt it was appropriate to suspend it, but obviously, as you say, we are still introducing it in 2012 and we are consulting on that at the moment. We would expect to see substantial pre-compliance based on the previous Low Emission Zone phases where we have seen pre-compliance of 50 to 75 per cent quite substantially before the introduction of the Low Emission Zone and, apart from anything else, having suspended it, there is just a certain lead time associated with getting all the infrastructure in place, so putting it in for 2010 is not really an option anymore.

Q13 Dr Turner: What is going to stop London achieving its future air quality targets?

Ms Dedring: I think three things: one, execution on our side, and hopefully that will not be a problem; two, there are certainly policy measures which we have suggested in the Strategy from a national perspective which, we think, are essential to delivering these targets, so what we have said in the Strategy is not just what we think is needed to be done by the GLA, but also what we need the boroughs to do and what we need national government to do, and simply nobody foresaw this. Although, for example, if you look at the European limit values, those came in ten years ago, but there was not any, "Ok, right, we're going to allocate this amount of budget in order to tackle this problem", so we are now in a position where nobody at any level of government has foreseen the couple of hundred million pounds that ideally would be needed to tackle this problem. It is very easy to get into a finger-pointing, "No, you pay for it", "No, you pay for it", especially at this time in the public spending situation, but we are trying to just take a collaborative approach to say, "Look, this is the way to tackle this problem", and we need to have a conversation about how we actually fund some of these measures because saying that we are not going to do anything about it is not acceptable. I just think that, if you look at the health costs associated with a lot of these things, there is absolutely no link between the funding that is available and the avoided health costs if you were to invest in it, that is just not there at all, and on the delivery side we have tried to work with the NHS on this. It is not as if they are opposed to the concept, but there is no real joined-up thinking on the subject at all in terms of from a preventative standpoint and it might well be a much better investment to invest in some of these things from a health perspective, so a lot of that connection simply is not happening, but there is a pretty stark funding issue on this, on both PM10 and on the NO2 side. On PM10 we are trying to kind of cobble it together out of two bits of TfL funding, and the more you keep pushing, the more you are able to put something together, but it is just not where we need to be, and actually the fact that the European Union have talked about up to a £300 million fine is fantastic because it is a great force for us to say, "Right, well, we should all be prepared to pay up to £299 million to address this issue".

Q14 Dr Turner: I was just going to ask quickly whether you were fearful of European penalties, and you clearly are.

Ms Dedring: I embrace them!

Q15 Dr Turner: How likely do you think they are?

Ms Dedring: On PM10, as I say, the work that we have done so far has been identifying the policy measures and its rough modelling, but we are quite confident that we can deliver the European standards and, therefore, avoid the fine, but we are just doing the detailed modelling because the nature of air quality is quite complex, so hopefully that will show that we are right and we can actually get there, but then it is about making sure that the things that we have said need to happen to deliver that actually do happen. This issue is still not at the level that it needs to be. You were saying earlier about adaptation and is this really in people's minds, in the forefront of people's minds. It is if you are Defra, but actually it needs to be if you are DfT because they are making all the decisions on transport emissions that actually affect air quality and it needs to be a frontline issue for the Department of Health, so Defra can care about it all it wants, but fundamentally it has got to be a mainstream issue for the other relevant departments, Treasury as well. At the London level, there is the same issue, that it is TfL that really needs to get this, not the environment team at City Hall.

Q16 Jo Swinson: You are just touching on what I was about to ask and you might want to expand slightly. What is your assessment of how well different government departments are co-ordinating their work on dealing with air quality issues? Is it working?

Ms Dedring: We have got a very good working relationship with Defra which is great. I just think that these issues are not front and centre for somebody like DfT, and again I think that is changing, so that is fantastic, and I think some of the European limit value stuff has really focused people's minds. It is unfortunate that it has had to come to that, but, in a way, it is a good thing, so we are pushing quite hard on different parts of Government, but it is quite difficult because we kind of go and see the DfT and we talk to Defra and we will talk to the Treasury and we will talk to whoever, and it just feels like that is quite hard work and obviously, when you think about the NO2 issue where you have got many cities that are going to be confronting the same problem, it just feels, with the potential for endless discussions without any kind of focus, that co-ordination is going to be quite difficult. I am not sure, but Defra has got the responsibility to deal with this issue, but they do not have all the levers. Most of the levers sit somewhere else and the funding sits somewhere else, so I do not know what the right solution to that problem is.

Q17 Jo Swinson: Is it just that it is not high enough up the other government departments' agendas or is it ultimately that there are actually conflicts between the different departments on this issue?

Ms Dedring: I think it is more conflicts between air quality and other issues and how do you sort of balance those things. It is a difficult issue on transport, and again why you would want to deal with it with a lot of advance notice is that the turnover in the fleet in London, for example, is about seven per cent a year, so it is not as if half the vehicles are turning round every year, so you want to have a lot of advance notice of new standards coming in and you just want people to only be able to buy clean vehicles, and that is the perfect scenario. If you do not have that, then you are basically talking about imposing an unexpected cost on individuals or businesses and that cost is either going to be borne by them or it is going to be borne by us because we are going to pay them to upgrade their vehicle, but indirectly it will be borne by them through the tax regime or through some other form of charging, so you just do not want to end up there in the first place. I think it is more that there are certain tensions between, for example, the carbon agenda and the air quality agenda and sometimes they push in the same direction and sometimes they do not and there is not enough tied-up thinking on that. Even in the GLA, it is hard to constantly remember to balance those two things. Combined heat and power is an interesting example where you would want to have biomass fuel CHP plants, but in certain cases actually they can contribute to poor air quality, so we have to be quite careful about how we balance those two things. I think some of that is more accident than design, I guess, in terms of some of the tensions.

Q18 Jo Swinson: Just looking at your NOx graphic of London and the sort of hotspots, as you can expect, the central London bit is quite yellow with little red bits on the main routes, but there is then this rather large yellow blob to the south-west which, I imagine, is Heathrow.

Ms Dedring: Yes.

Q19 Jo Swinson: Looking at the estimated reduction of course from 2006 to 2015, you have got most of the forms of transport reducing NOx emissions, but the airport just staying steady at the same block. Do you think that is a conflict in terms of the GLA's point of view for the London plan for air quality, and how much of the Heathrow expansion, because presumably, if it does expand depending on the timescale that we are talking about, it might be beyond that graph, but that is just going to have a negative effect?

Ms Dedring: That is one of the big reasons we have opposed the expansion of Heathrow and the construction of the third runway because it is a combination of aircraft as well as road traffic going in and out of Heathrow. There are things that you can do at the margins to reduce that, but we were just starting with "Let's not increase it" as a starting point, but yes, it is definitely an issue. That is one of the arguments for, whenever you might think about it, moving the airport, for example, to the Thames Estuary and moving more activity to other airports where there is less population density, not just for over-flying and noise reasons, but also because of the exposure to air quality. It is one of those things that is quite difficult to explain to people because, if you say, "I'm going to shift the air pollution from here to somewhere else", that does not seem any better, but obviously it is about exposing human beings to it, so it is not something that you would want to have co-located with a densely developed urban area; it just does not make any sense.

Q20 Jo Swinson: What do you think are the key things the Government should be doing that they are not currently on air quality?

Ms Dedring: There is a long list!

Mr Cousins: Overall, there are measures particularly to do with NOx which, we think, could be taken. We talked earlier about how NOx is a problem across the country, not just in London, so we would like to see low emission zones promoted across the country, so we think a national framework for low emission zones would be very helpful. We also think that, if we are going to have a NOx standard in low emission zones, then you need some sort of certification scheme for vehicle retrofit. There is a similar scheme for particulate matter traps, but nothing yet for NOx traps and NOx abatement equipment, so we would like to see a certification scheme put in place and that could help not just for low emission zones, but also for tax incentive schemes and other such incentives. We think that targeted scrappage schemes would help because we have seen the success of the scheme for private cars. If it were targeted at certain sectors, like taxis, for example, then that would have significant benefits for urban areas, and also we would like to see funding for vehicle retrofit because that is one relatively cheap way in which operators can really make a difference and reduce their impact on air quality. We would like to see further incentives. I know that the Government is doing a lot of work on electric vehicles and cleaner fuels and technologies, but we would like to see further work done in that area and again tax incentives or other schemes to actually encourage the construction of these vehicles. One area we have not really talked about so far is that about 20 per cent of NOx emissions in London are caused by domestic heating systems, so we think that there is an open goal here really. We could have schemes which address fuel efficiency and heating efficiency which benefit not only carbon dioxide emissions, but also reduce emissions of NOx, so you would have fuel efficiency and energy efficiency schemes which had two benefits there as well as saving money for users. I think also that there are knowledge gaps. We have already talked about the fact that we do not really understand why emissions seem to be going down, the concentrations, but the actual air quality is not improving as fast. I think we need to know more about that so that local authorities can put in place measures and policies which are actually going to address the real causes. I think also another area that we touched on is tyre and brake wear and, even though it seems relatively small, whilst Euro standards are addressing exhaust emissions, there is no similar regulation for tyre and brake wear, so, whether it is done at the national level or, more likely really, the European level, we think there needs to be some sort of regulation for tyres and brake systems to similarly reduce their emissions.

Ms Dedring: One other thing where doing it at the national level just makes more sense is communication around the health impacts of air pollution and to consumers as decision-makers. When you buy your dishwasher now, pretty much people know that they should look for an A or B-rated thing and it is quite a simple graphic, but there is no equivalent thing for your car that says, "This one is bad for your kids when they stand behind it and this one isn't". Again, that is quite a low-cost thing to do and an easy way to get the message across to consumers, and the very same people who probably complain about their children being exposed to pollution from trucks will then go out and buy quite a polluting vehicle themselves, so those kinds of things. Then, also the communication around the impacts of air pollution and how to avoid it for vulnerable groups, again that is something that really would be a lot easier to do systematically through the health networks. It is good in some places, but it is quite patchy a lot of the time. Obviously, we all want to live in a scenario where there are no emissions anywhere in London and everybody does not have to worry about it, but in the interim we do need to improve how we communicate where the problems are and when they arise.

Q21 Mark Lazarowicz: On this issue of the health implications of poor air quality, we have had some written evidence that suggests that some of the Government's estimates are on the low side for the actual consequences of poor air quality. Have you carried out any quantification yourself of the effects of poor air quality?

Ms Dedring: The one sentence for you is that we would tend to agree with that and we are doing a piece of work in the next chapter of the Air Quality Strategy, looking at exactly that question, which is London-specific, but obviously it is not really London-specific and it is seeking to quantify that. In the first draft, we have just said, "There are significant health implications and impacts, thousands of deaths a year, and, therefore, you would want to do something about it, whether it is a thousand, 8,000 or 16,000 people".

Q22 Mark Lazarowicz: You are still doing the research for it?

Ms Dedring: Yes, it is something that we are doing at the moment. I do not know whether you want to say anything more about that, Simon.

Mr Cousins: I think there are two reasons why we are doing this. We are going to be looking at quantifying the impacts in health terms, firstly, because I think it is important that we sell the message that air quality is not just an environmental issue, but also a health issue, and we can do that if we can actually illustrate what the impacts are. That is also going to persuade decision-makers, local politicians and local officials, that air quality is an important issue. There is always an element of air quality being the Cinderella issue compared to climate change, so we need to make clear that it really is something that is affecting local residents' lives. The second reason is that, when we come to implement the Strategy, we need to know where the health impacts are worse so that we can actually target our measures to where they are going to have the maximum impact on human health, so that is why it is important that we look at it, not just in the whole and come up with a figure, but that we also target and look at where the actual geographical areas are most affected.

Q23 Mark Lazarowicz: So the picture we get certainly is that the overall understanding of the effects of poor air quality is pretty patchy amongst both Government and local authorities. Is that fair or is that too much of a generalisation?

Mr Cousins: I think that probably is fair to a certain extent. The Government advisory body, COMEAP, has recently carried out some further research on the impact of particulate matter and I think really it is just a question of all of us, Government and local authorities, carrying out further investigations in our own areas to see what the actual impacts are.

Ms Dedring: But also coming up with a shared view. There is not a single view where you could say that every unit of air pollution equals that many years of life and then again going back to some of these really boring points about business cases and things like that, but then every time a funding decision gets taken, you can put a number in, but at the moment nobody agrees what the number is, so it is just a generic, "Does this tackle air pollution?" "Maybe", so that would enable it to become a much more hard-nosed issue in the way that it is tackled, and we can form a view ourselves, but that will not necessarily solve the problem at the national level; it will not.

Q24 Chairman: I think we have covered most of the ground. Are there any other burning issues you wanted to mention in relation to this?

Ms Dedring: On air quality particularly?

Q25 Chairman: Yes.

Ms Dedring: Not really. It is quite a frustrating issue because I think it is something where, if you talk to Londoners, they really care about it and it is something that people would consistently rate at the top of their environmental concerns, and I am sure you find that nationally, but we have not had the level of activity on this. There has been a lot of good stuff that has happened and low emission zones are good, they are useful, the Congestion Charge is good and useful and the things that we are trying to do on black cabs. We have put in the Air Quality Strategy that one of the big sources of PM in central London is all the black cabs that are 15 or 20 years old still running around on the road, and the particulate traps that we put into those kinds of vehicles do not really work the way they need to work. Then there is some of the stuff that we are doing round buses. It is all to the good, but there just simply is not the level of focus and attention and it is quite like pulling teeth, I think, to get people to say, "Right, what are we going to do to actually get there and try and shift the boat around again quickly enough, given that we've sort of not paid attention to this issue at the level that we needed to in the past?" Funnily enough, people love electric vehicles, for example, because it feels like, "I don't have to compromise anything about my lifestyle, but I'm going to get an environmental good out of it" which is a zero-emission vehicle, so it is changing and I think the situation is improving quite a lot, but we are just not seeing that scale of activity, I think, that we need to see and the sense of pace which, I think, is needed.

Q26 Chairman: Well, thank you very much for coming in; it has been a very useful and interesting session.

Ms Dedring: Thanks for having us.