City Centre air pollution recorded in 2024

The Council recently consulted on a new Air Quality Action plan. This included no new targets and no new measures apart from a proposal to erect barriers on Stephenson Road between the pavement and the road.

The plan’s priorities are

• to achieve compliance with the NO2 annual mean objective within the AQMA and maintain compliance for at least three years to enable revocation of the AQMA,
• to achieve compliance with the NO2 annual mean Limit Values within the CAZ and work towards revocation of the CAZ, and
• to collaborate with North East Combined Authority (NECA) on transport related issues, including the electrification of buses, as bus emissions have been identified as the primary contributor to remaining exceedances of the NO2 annual mean objective.

You can read SPACE for Gosforth’s response below, and why we disagree with these priorities.

What does the plan say?

Key points:

1. The plan only covers the city centre and Coast Road. Air pollution in Gosforth has been within legal limits since 2020 so the Council intend to revoke the Gosforth Air Quality Management Area (AQMA).
2. Approximately 45,000 people live within the city centre AQMA.
3. While Stephenson Road (entrance to Jesmond Park West) has the highest recorded air pollution, substantially over the legal limit, the Council estimate that pollution levels will actually be within legal limits on the adjacent foot/cycle path. The plan doesn’t mention that motorists will be regularly exposed to these higher levels of pollution.
4. In 2024, a year after the Clean Air Zone (CAZ) was implemented, diesel buses were still responsible for 50% of air pollution on Market Street, whereas 42% was from regional and local background pollution. Cars, LGVs and HGVs only accounted for 8% at this location. An estimated 36% of the background pollution was due to road emissions.
5. At St Mary’s Place, 42% of air pollution was estimated to be due to buses.
6. On Stephenson Road, the biggest contributors to air pollution are diesel cars (39%) and LGVs (24%).
7. The plan states only three measures will have a high impact to reduce air pollution. These are the CAZ, bus electrification, and exposure limitation on Stephenson Road – essentially a barrier between traffic and the adjacent foot/cycle path.
8. A study has been commissioned to assess whether barriers would reduce air pollution on Stephenson Road. This will be complete in 2026.
9. The Council assesses that if the plan is implemented, the main objective of the plan (full compliance with legal air quality limits) will be achieved in 2026. These limits should have been achieved by 2010.

SPACE for Gosforth’s response

Priorities

The main priority in the new Air Quality Action plan is to achieve compliance with air quality limits, but the plan says “compliance will [already] be achieved in 2026”.

The plan also says “Following three years of compliance with the AQO [Air Quality Objectives] and the revocation of the AQMA [Air Quality Management Area], an Air Quality Strategy (AQS) will be produced and implemented to continue improving air quality and public health after the objectives have been achieved.”

This appears to suggest that the plan is just a very longwinded way of saying the Council will do nothing to improve air quality for the next four years, and only then will think about how it can be improved.

Not only that but the objectives specifically aim to remove both the city centre Air Quality Management Area and the Clean Air Zone (CAZ), both of which are likely to be key to achieving further reductions in air pollution.

In the information accompanying the Council’s consultation on the Clean Air Zone, the Council acknowledged that “air pollution is one of the biggest environmental threats to human health” and that “there are no safe levels of pollution”. Why then is the plan so lacking in ambition?

Comments on the Plan

We do welcome the focus on the most effective “priority targeted measures”, these being the Clean Air Zone, bus electrification and exposure limitation at Stephenson Road. These are the most likely to be effective to reduce air pollution.

These align with our own summary of the evidence, which found that roadside air pollution can be reduced in one of three main ways.

1. By reducing the number of polluting vehicles
2. By reducing the amount of pollution emitted per vehicle
3. By reducing people’s exposure to pollution

We suggest these would make a better categorisation of actions to be taken than those in the plan.

Of the proposed categories, “Alternatives to private vehicle use”, “Promoting low emission transport” and “Promoting travel alternatives” are unlikely to be effective by themselves without some form of restriction on vehicle travel. “Policy guidance and development control” doesn’t obviously achieve any of the three ways in which pollution can be reduced, and “Vehicle fleet efficiency” is potentially misleading, not least as diesel engines are generally more efficient than petrol engines but also emit more pollutants.

It would also be useful to consider measures relating to non-traffic sources of pollution, in particular wood burning stoves.

Finally, the Air Quality Action Plan is an extremely technical document. Both the consultation and the plan itself would benefit from a plain English summary to enable a much wider range of input and feedback to the plan.