Archived press release

Gummer ducks key solution to air pollution - traffic reduction

21 August 1996

Friends of the Earth criticises the Government's draft National Air Quality Strategy [1] for failing to tackle the main cause of air pollution- too much traffic. Official estimates predict that the number of vehicles on our roads could double by 2025. Such an increase would invalidate improvements in air quality achieved by technical fixes'such as catalytic converters. The real solutions are clear: a reduction in traffic and an increase in investment in public transport.

Tony Bosworth, Friends of the Earth's Air Pollution Campaigner said:

Setting air quality targets without reducing the main cause of air pollution is simply pulling the plug out without turning off the taps. Mr Gummer hasn't the guts or the support of his cabinet colleagues to grasp the nettle of seriously challenging the road lobby and Mrs Thatcher's beloved Great Car Economy'.

Furthermore, the draft strategy will allow health standards for ozone[2], the main cause of Summertime Smog', to be broken on 10 days per year. This is a backdown from Mr Gummer[3] on his pledge made only 3 months ago to get rid' of this key aggravator of asthma.

The draft strategy is firmly guided by the free market principles of cost benefit analysis, allowing pollution control measures to be judged on their costs[4].

Tony Bosworth added:

Applying cost benefit analysis to pollution control measures will put the profit margins of the motor industry before public health,condemning thousands of people to premature death and ill health.Breathing clean air should be a basic human right not something subject to free-market dogma. It's time the polluter paid, and in this case it's the motor trade that should pick up the tab for years of resisting pollution controls.'

ENDS

NOTES TO EDITORS:

[1] The United Kingdom National Air Quality Strategy - consultation draft.

[2] The Government's Expert Panel on Air Quality Standards(EPAQS) recommended an air quality standard for ozone of 50 parts per billion (ppb) as a running 8-hour average (EPAQS, 1994,"Ozone").

[3] In an interview on BBC World Service "Newshour" on Tuesday 21st May, John Gummer said "We are now down to the nasty, but reducing every year, effect which we call summertime smog and I'm determined to get rid of that within the next ten years."

[4] The Strategy states that "measures which incur a cost should achieve equivalent or greater benefits" (Part I, Chapter 4, Paragraph 11).

This Sunday will see a car protest with a difference beside the proposed Newbury bypass. Organised by Friends of the Earth and the Brighton Life Arts Centre, ART BYPASS is a mile long "fantasy motorway" featuring contributions by well known artists such as Christo and Jeanne Claude, Heathcote Williams, the Cholmondeleys,Steve Bell and Werner Herzog.

ART BYPASS: Sunday 25 August 5-10 pm

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Published by Friends of the Earth Trust