The Healthy Air Coalition is calling on the government to introduce a new Clean Air Act, aligned with WHO guidelines and with legally binding targets robust enough to match the scale of the public health challenge.
Ahead of the King’s Speech, the coalition, which is made up of more than 30 leading health and clean air charities including the British Heart Foundation and Asthma + Lung UK, have released new analysis that reveals large parts of rural England have air pollution levels comparable to the country’s biggest cities, and that the most deprived communities are facing the worst air quality.
Based on DEFRA data, the analysis ranks air pollution levels across England finding that areas long considered green and pleasant are recording PM2.5 readings that rival major metropolitan centres.
Cannock Chase in Staffordshire, much of which falls within an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, has estimated pollution levels on a par with Birmingham and Barking and Dagenham.
West Northamptonshire records higher estimated levels than Manchester, Leeds and Luton, while other rural and semi-rural areas appearing high in the rankings include West Suffolk, Great Yarmouth, Surrey Heath and Cornwall.
The picture is made worse by a deep inequality dimension. When the pollution data is mapped against the government’s own deprivation index, 27 areas emerge where the highest pollution levels coincide with the highest levels of deprivation, representing a double burden on communities that already have the fewest resources.
These areas include East London boroughs, Lambeth, Birmingham, Coventry, Manchester, Salford, Sheffield, Nottingham and Derby.
Across England as a whole, 343 of the country’s 361 local authorities exceed the World Health Organisation’s recommended annual limit for PM2.5. Separate analysis from the British Heart Foundation finds that 57.9 million people, or 98.7% of England’s population, live in areas where that limit is breached. Air pollution contributes to an estimated 43,000 deaths in the UK each year.
Dr Camilla Kingdon, Chair of the Healthy Air Coalition and a senior NHS paediatrician, said: ‘We are not talking about a niche environmental concern – we are talking about 58 million people, in every corner of England, breathing air that falls short of what is safe. And the communities bearing the greatest burden are the ones that already have the least. This is a policy failure, and it is one that the Government can change.’
Dr Bethan Davies, Sustainability Lead at the British and Irish Association of Stroke Physicians, said the link between fine particle pollution and serious illness was well established. ‘It damages blood vessels, promotes inflammation and accelerates the conditions that lead to a brain attack. Crucially, this data shows that the people already at greatest risk — those in our most deprived communities — are also the ones breathing the most toxic air.’
Photo: William Hook
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