Introduce legal targets for air quality

Our verdict

• This is a promise to write targets around air quality into UK law.
• The wide-ranging Environment Bill, currently progressing through Parliament, “introduces a duty on the government to set at least two air quality targets by October 2022”. Although not an air quality target, in May 2021, new regulations were introduced on the sale of coal, wet wood and manufactured solid fuels for domestic use, to reduce the emission of pollutants damaging to health.
• It’s worth noting that the UK already has legislation to limit the amount of certain harmful pollutants in the atmosphere, and recent data shows the country looks likely to exceed those limits for 2020 and 2030. The process of setting new legal targets for air quality is far from complete, but the preliminary legislation (the Environment Bill) is under way, so this policy is ‘in progress’.