London Takes Just One Week To Breach Annual Air Pollution Limits

London has already breached annual pollution limits just one week into 2016, and only weeks after the government published its plans to clean up the UK’s air.

At 7am on Friday, Putney High Street in West London breached annual limits for nitrogen dioxide (NO2), a toxic gas produced by diesel vehicles that has been linked to respiratory and heart problems. 

Under EU rules, sites are only allowed to breach hourly limits of 200 micrograms of NO2 per cubic metre of air 18 times in a year, but this morning Putney broke that limit for the 19th time. Chelsea and Kensington is expected to do the same later today.

Oxford Street has almost certainly also broken the limit already, having breached the hourly level a thousand times last year, but the monitoring station has malfunctioned.

Campaigners said it was “breathtaking” the breach had come so early, though Oxford Street breached the annual limit in two days in 2015.

Nationally, a roadside near the South Wales town of Swffryd appears to be the only other place to have broken the hourly limit, though it is still far from having breached the annual limit. Other sites recording high readings so far this year include ones in Aberdeen, Belfast, Exeter, Glasgow and Stoke-on-Trent, and several other roads in London.

The UK has been in breach of EU NO2 pollution limits for five years now and last spring was ordered by the supreme court to publish an action plan on how to tackle the major health crisis, following a challenge by environmental law group ClientEarth.

The resulting government plan was published in December, but London, Birmingham, Leeds, Liverpool, Cardiff and Edinburgh and other major cities will still be in breach of NO2 limits for at least another five years, despite the new measures. Private passenger cars are exempt from the plan.

Attention on the harm caused to human health by NO2 came to the fore last year when it was revealed that VW had cheated NO2 emissions tests in the US, with the scandal affecting 1.2m diesel cars in the UK. Next week, VW UK bosses will be quizzed by MPs on the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs committee on diesel pollution and what they are doing to make cleaner cars.