Meeting of the Parliament 12 March 2014
The Environment Act 1995 required local authorities to assess air quality in their area and, where that exceeds air quality standards, to declare an air quality management area and prepare air quality action plans to tackle the problem.
Edinburgh has five air quality management areas. Over the past two decades, the council has introduced a number of initiatives to encourage people out of their cars. That includes greenways for public transport, park-and-ride sites located around the city boundary, and the city car club. Those initiatives have encouraged people out of their cars and, in 2011, 30 per cent of the population used either the bus or the train, 25 per cent walked and 7 per cent cycled.
Across Scotland, since the 1990s, there has been a significant reduction in pollution emissions, with decreases of 65 per cent in nitrogen oxides, 58 per cent in particulates and 79 per cent in sulphur dioxide.
In Edinburgh, until recently we had seen improvements in air quality. Between 2008 and 2010, the annual mean concentration of nitrogen oxide in St John’s Road fell by a third. However, we are starting to see a deterioration in air quality along the four main arterial routes into the city from the west as a result of an increase in the volume of traffic. Nitrogen oxide levels in St John’s Road increased by 23 per cent over the two-year period to 2012, with Queensferry Road breaching the limit by nearly 13 per cent in 2013. At the Gorgie Road end, the A71 has seen annual mean concentration levels of nitrogen oxide increase close to the EU limit.
In my constituency, the A70 at Currie is the only main arterial route in the west of the city to have very low levels of nitrogen oxide. However, that is hardly surprising when we realise that the monitoring station is not at the Lanark Road but is located beyond a housing estate, behind the main building of the high school. Further along the A70, at Slateford Road, there are signs that the annual levels may be being exceeded, which suggests that the monitoring station at Currie should probably be relocated closer to the main road.
That increasing air quality problem in the west of the city will only get worse as we see an increasing number of proposals for housing developments, whether it is Edinburgh’s garden district, or new homes surrounding Ratho village and in the Edinburgh Western constituency of Colin Keir. New developments are also being built in West Lothian. All those additional homes, which run into many thousands, are commutable into Edinburgh, which will result in a deterioration in the quality of life for people who live along the main routes into Edinburgh.
The planning system must treat air quality as a material planning consideration:
“The planning system plays a key role in protecting and improving the environment. Land use planning and development control can become an effective tool to improve air quality by first locating developments in such a way as to reduce emissions overall, and secondly reducing the direct impacts of those developments. Although the presence of an AQMA makes consideration of the air quality impacts of a proposed development more important, there is still a need to regard air quality as a material factor in determining planning applications in any location. This is particularly important where the proposed development is not physically within the AQMA, but could have adverse impacts on air quality within it, or where air quality in that given area is close to exceeding guideline objectives itself.”
I welcome the fact that the Scottish Government is reviewing and overhauling the local air quality management system. In order for any new system to be effective, we need not only to reduce emissions from traffic but to ensure that planning decisions do not add to the problem.
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