Amongst all of the furore that is currently enveloping UK politics with elections and Brexit, the UK Government finally its policy proposals from improving air quality in the UK.
The most relevant of all the announcements was a new Environment Bill, which promises to “increase local powers to tackle sources of air pollution.” The announcement didn’t go into much detail apart from that, but an interesting snippet in the briefing notes is how government is “planning to bring forward powers for Government to mandate recalls of vehicles when they do not meet relevant legal emission standards.”
Reading this, we cannot help but think about research undertaken in recent years stating that whilst emission standards are useful, what is more important is how such vehicles are operated in the real world. Vehicles that are nominally of an improved engine efficiency may perform worse under real world conditions compared to those of a worse engine efficiency.
Government needs to be careful here. Whilst in the long run this may prove to be useful, highly efficient and low polluting operations may be disrupted due to such legislation. Not to mention it being a significant cost to operators who may have recently invested in more efficient fleets.
Another interesting announcement, again for which there was no detail, was a new regulator – the Office for Environmental Protection. The announcement talked big on creating a world-leading regulatory framework, but apart from that we know very little. We hope that industry is deeply engaged in the process of establishing this regulator, so that regulation is effective as well as world-leading.
The remainder of the announcement on this new act focussed on minimising biodiversity loss and tackling carbon emissions. Not to mention reducing plastic consumption. Very worthwhile policy aims.
In all, the Queens Speech contained flickers of promise for improving air quality. Increasing local powers were are interested by, but Government mandating recalls of high emission vehicles does concern us somewhat. The devil will be in the detail, which we look forward to seeing.
