Assessment of the first phase of the UK national air quality strategy

Abstract

The Environment Act 1995 introduced the National Air Quality Strategy which initiated new statutory duties for local authorities from April 1997. For the first time, local authorities have been given the responsibility for reviewing and assessing local air quality with regard to national air quality objectives for eight pollutants. Air Quality Management Areas must be designated where air quality objectives are not met, or may not be met if no precautionary action is taken. For those areas, local authorities are required to draw up an air quality management plan (Action Plan) setting out the necessary transport and planning measures needed to ensure that the air quality objectives will be met by 2005. In order to reduce the difficulties facing local authorities in reviewing and assessing local air quality, aspects of the National Air Quality Strategy were piloted by 14 local authority groupings in 1996-97. This paper outlines the work undertaken by these authorities with a view to assessing whether this pilot phase was effective in ensuring that all local authorities were better placed to undertake their new duties frrom April 1997. Projects undertaken by First Phase authorities include testing the appropriateness of simple screening questions (stage one of the review and assessment process) intended to prevent many local authorities with no significant air quality problems from having to undertake costly monitoring or modelling work. Other projects include the establishment of an intensive street canyon monitoring site in Greater London in order to develop and validate street canyon models, assessing the confidence with which measurements obtained from simple samplers (e.g. passive diffusion tubes) can be used to indicate whether a location is likely to exceed national air quality objectives, filling in national data gaps (e.g. PM^ levels in the vicinity of quarries), and testing a wide range of models. Delays in the completion of First Phase projects have meant that detailed guidance was not available to all local authorities in April 1997. This may have caused unnecessary time and resources to have been spent by some local authorities uncertain whether they needed to have undertaken the second stage of the review and assessment process or not. Some differences in approaches and inconsistences to the review and assessment process may have developed too. Transactions on Ecology and the Environment vol 15, © 1997 WIT Press, www.witpress.com, ISSN 1743-3541