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Our mission, to tackle air quality – London Borough of Merton

The Air Quality Team at the Regulatory Services Partnership (led by Merton Council and including Richmond and Wandsworth) is a tri-borough coalition that is on a mission to clean up London’s air. The team’s Cleaning Up Construction project was set up in 2019 to tackle construction as a source of pollution. Since then, the team’s remit has evolved from monitoring air quality, influencing council contracts; and undertaking local lobbying to delivering the world’s first. Low Emissions Zone for Construction; creating an air quality accreditation scheme for construction; to delivering the London Code of Practice for Construction and Demolition, to which many boroughs subscribe.


The challenge

The impetus of the team’s work is both compelling and vital: more than 9,000 premature deaths in the UK are due to poor air quality. The Environmental Audit Committee estimates the national health cost of air pollution is between £9bn and £2bn a year. And nowhere is this felt more keenly than London, where pollution levels exceed both EU and UK air quality standards.

It is against this stark backdrop an Air Quality Team Partnership was born: a ground-breaking coalition of partners – led by Merton Council.

Local authorities have a duty to act to tackle poor air quality, with the current situation considered by many to be a public health emergency. Councils have sought to improve air quality by running awareness raising campaigns and introducing measures to reduce traffic in congestion hotspots. However, many of these schemes do not have a directly measurable impact on reducing pollution.

One major air polluter is the construction industry, responsible for dangerous quantities of nitrogen dioxide and fine particulates.

London-wide data shows that around 34 per cent of PM10 particulates and 15 per cent of PM2.5s can be attributed to construction machinery alone. For years, there has been nothing to stop a dirty digger or other polluting plant having a significant adverse impact on local air quality.

The long-term health impacts of these pollutants include respiratory illness, cardiovascular disease and mortality as well as lung cancer; reduced lung function (especially in children); and have strong links to early onset dementia and autism.

Research shows that those exposed to the worst air pollution are more likely to be poorer Londoners and those from minority communities.

The solution

Pollutants on construction sites are most often produced by the diesel engines in off-road machinery and static engines such as power generators (collectively known as non-road mobile machinery or NRMM).

Around six years ago, the Greater London Authority proposed to use local planning rules to tackle this. Delivery was down to individual boroughs, and, at that time, there was large-scale dissent, on the basis it was impossible to deliver locally, let alone consistently throughout London. This was due to several factors, including staffing, expertise and general willingness.

Merton Council’s Air Quality Team accepted the challenge and created a borough cluster group. 2023 was its most ambitious – and successful – year-to-date.

The team developed a brand-new approach to air quality management, including:

  • Developing and delivering standardised planning rules
  • Carrying out construction site auditing - requiring engines with prescribed power ratings to meet emissions standards -then deploying boots-on-the-ground to actively. check machines and remove the most polluting
  • Producing guidance materials and delivering education packages to construction firms of all sizes
  • Engaging the entire machine manufacture and supply chain to speed up delivery of cleaner technologies

The impact

The initial project trialled within the south London boroughs and delivered a site compliance rate of 92 per cent - a threefold increase from the initial 28 per cent.

Today, the team covers the whole capital - creating the world’s first fully implemented Low Emissions Zone for Construction - on behalf of the Mayor of London’s office and London boroughs.

The work of the team has had an incredible ripple-effect: companies now actively compete against each other to demonstrate their green credentials, which has proven to be an effective way of ‘soft’ enforcement, with some contractors self-applying these standards to sites outside of London.

This new requirement to replace polluting machines with cleaner machinery has been placing pressure on the supply chain, opening up competition for new technologies, which means a much cleaner - often state-of-the-art - fleet is being used.

This multi-pronged approach of education, awareness and soft enforcement has delivered a considerable and measurable reduction in pollution across the capital, with emissions compliance driven up from a 28 per cent London-wide baseline in 2015 to 90 per cent across the capital today.

In 2023 the team collaborated with innovators in generator design, zero-emission engines, fuel cell, H2 ICE and retrofit manufacturers, reassuring investors in new kit that a market will exist for future innovative products.

The project covers all London areas – from the wealthiest to the most deprived – so all communities are directly benefiting through reduced pollution, and therefore better health outcomes.

How is the new approach being sustained?

The team and its operational processes, guidance materials and partnership approach with the industry have become so refined over the last few years that the project is now a model for cities throughout the world. Indeed, officers have been actively encouraging urgent uptake of Construction Low Emissions Zones in major urban centres up and down the country.

Officers network with contractor environmental teams and site managers on a regular basis, helping them to achieve excellent certification for their projects each and every time. They are a regular presence at trade shows and events, taking part in engagements up and down the country, and spreading the message that many more neighbourhoods nationally are experiencing needless exposure to pollutants.

Officers presented at Defra’s 2023 AQ Symposium, attracting interest from many cities nationally. They also presented to the Planning and Infrastructure Working Party at the Westminster Commission for Road AQ; the Institute for Air Quality Management; the Environmental Industries Commission; and to UKHSA - always pressing the need for funding for growth and a national framework for change.

The team is currently looking at ways to embed other mitigations around construction in the scheme, such as travel plans, dust management and construction logistics, offering a comprehensive scheme of construction management tools.

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