 Good morning. Welcome to the 28th meeting of 2017 of the Environment, Climate Change and Land Reform Committee. Before we move to the first item on the agenda, I'd like to remind everyone present to switch off mobile phones and other electronic devices as they may affect the broadcasting system. The first item on the agenda is for the committee to consider whether to take item 5 in private. Are we all agreed? We are indeed agreed. The second item of business today is the continuation of taking evidence on the committee's inquiry into air quality in Scotland. The panel will this morning, and I welcome all of you. David Duffey, the junior vice president of the Royal Environmental Health Institute of Scotland, Dr Scott Hamilton, the principal air quality consultant at Ricardo Energy and Environment, Vincent McNally, the environmental health officer at Sustainable Glasgow City Council. Good morning. Dennis Milligan, head of communications from the Stove Industry Alliance and Professor Mark Sutton, environmental physicist of NERC. Members have a series of questions to ask you this morning, gentlemen, and we'll kick off with Kate Forbes. Good morning to the panel. I'd like to direct my first question to Professor Mark Sutton to ask how you would update the Cleaner Air for Scotland to ensure a more integrative and cross-sectoral policy. That's a tough one. I'm going to speak as a scientist and my expertise is especially in agriculture and air pollution, especially in the nitrogen cycle. I think that my first point would be to say that I realise that this committee doesn't just deal with air pollution but deals with other challenges as well, climate challenges, biodiversity challenges. I'm not sure whether that's on your radar. My first comment would be not just to see air pollution in isolation and realise that there are win-wins between different policy sectors. If I consider the nitrogen cycle, which I'm specifically an expert in, so it's not a bad place to start, I would say that we are losing substantial amounts of nitrogen into the air as air pollution, and that applies both as nitrogen oxides and as ammonia, ammonia primarily coming from agriculture. That air pollution has actually got value as nitrogen. If you multiply it by the fertiliser price as nitrogen, we're losing a substantial amount of resource, which turns from a resource, into pollution. I think that encourages us when looking to your question of more integration to think of what is the value of the thing which you've lost, which started out as a resource and then became pollution where we didn't want it. If I just give an example on the agriculture side, and I take total European nitrogen emissions, the value of that is about, from agriculture alone, 14 billion euro per year, 14 billion euro per year. That is about a quarter of the total common agricultural policy budget of 57 billion euro a year. Actually, we're losing from agriculture a massive value. We're losing several further more billion as nitrogen oxides if we could ever learn not just to destroy nitrogen oxides, but to capture it as a resource. Of course, that might help us go further on an international level than we'd gone before. When I think about your question about integration for air quality, my first point is think beyond air quality. Think of pollution as once being a resource that can help you meet several of the other goals. Taking nitrogen is contributing to air pollution, to ammonia pollution affecting biodiversity, to particulate matter affecting human health, nitrogen oxides of NO2 affecting human health. They're all in a way linked, and so, let's say, a more circular economy perspective could help us. I think that kind of thinking might actually also start helping us in other sectors as well, but I'm less of an expert in those. Great. Thanks very much. If I could then move on to Scott Hamilton and ask who, I believe, it's here on behalf of Ricardo. Yes. Yes. How Ricardo considers whether the effectiveness of the strategy and its relevant policies have been constrained by a lack of input from businesses and private secretary organisations? Depending on your answer to that one, how would you change that? Excuse me. I think that it's actually quite difficult from the outside looking in to, I guess, to really understand CAFs in a lot of detail. We are not very involved in the evolution of the programme, although we do a lot of our Scottish Government. We run the measurement networks and manage the Scottish air quality database, et cetera, but we haven't really had any involvement so much in CAFs. I think our response to the consultation question was more about—we probably would have had quite a lot to give to the process, but it just wasn't possible for whatever reason. Although I think the focus is naturally on road traffic, but there are other sectors that are important for air pollution in Scotland, one of them being industrial sector and commercial sectors. There's not a lot of focus on any of the other source types in CAFs that maybe private industry would be naturally interested if there was additional controls on emissions from, say, a commercial sector or industrial sector. Then, Vincent McNally, if I could ask you around how Glasgow City Council monitors progress against air quality targets and what performance indicators do you think would be useful at a national level in light of your experience at the local level? Glasgow reports annually and its annual progress report on the air quality that is monitored across the city. We have an extensive network of monitoring locations, more than 100 monitoring locations within the city. We report on them annually and we can show the trends that have generally been of improvement across the city over the past five years. We have monitoring data going back much longer than that. The network has been expanded year-on-year. We are in the process of adding more PM2.5 monitors that should be in place for the start of 2018. I think that the performance indicators that are important for the city are what is the trend in air quality in Glasgow and what are the levels that are being recorded. It is generally a good news story in Glasgow. We have more than 97 per cent of the city meeting all air quality targets, including the Scottish and World Health Organization targets for particulates that are the most demanding in Europe, the most demanding in the UK. I think that that, as a performance indicator, shows where we are and how well we are doing. I will allow a couple of members and we have slightly tangential questions about monitoring. Emma Harper. Yes, thank you very much, convener. I am interested in, like Glasgow City Council, for instance, have you thought about monitoring around schools by putting pollution monitors, NOx monitors on lollipop persons? Then you would be able to measure what is happening at school time when schools go in, schools go out and then in between times if there is an issue. The local air quality management regime is quite clear about where is a suitable monitoring location and it is not based on personal exposure such as you are mentioning, which would be maybe a person could wear or walk about with. It is based on fixed monitoring locations. With regard to schools, we are lucky in that we do not have any schools in Glasgow where air quality targets are not being met. None of them. We have air quality monitoring stations. We have the full air quality monitoring station in one school and other schools in the city centre. We have NO2 diffusion tubes located just to provide comfort to parents in concerned citizens that air quality targets are being met in the schools. That is positive in terms of the monitoring that is done and what is being found. Of course, there are still issues with kids having to walk past lines of cars that are sitting idling, waiting for parents waiting to pick them up at the school gates. The targets, the objectives that were required to meet, are not being exceeded at those locations but it is exposure to pollution that would be better avoided. To that end, we have, in the past, gone out and done weak idling enforcement outside schools where we have issued fixed penalty notices to parents of school children when they have been picking them up, which was not very well received, but it has to be done. The actual fact that we are talking about here is that there are very small concentrations of trace gases, as we would call them. It is actually very challenging to reliably measure gases and particles at the concentrations that are represented in the standards. Taking personal measurements, to my knowledge, there are no portable measurement methods that are sensitive enough to characterise air pollution at the levels that we would typically understand as being problematic. The uncertainty and measurements of the type that you mentioned would be very high and would be very difficult to reliably, reproducibly take those measurements and be confident that the results are reliable. That is a technological issue. We do not have the measurement methods to do that right now. John Scott has a question for Mark Sutton. Just to go beyond monitoring and to develop the theme of Professor Mark Sutton's idea of these NOx gases and ammonia, we had a long conversation at the NERC reception about this. Is there any clever chemistry out there about treating those gases, as you suggest, as a resource, as something to be harvested? There are 14 billion euros of nitrogen. It is not all wasted, but there must be some run-off in agriculture, but there are roadside gases that could perhaps be harvested. One can see, self-evidently, roadside verges that the grasses grow better close to the road than they do even 10 feet away from the road. That is simply a function of the nitrogen element of the pollution. Is there any way that you can think, in terms of clever chemistry, to look at turning this into a resource and an asset? I would say that the cusp of this discussion, where some technologies are beginning to run and others are still in our mind about how to get there. The first stage, of course, is this change of thinking towards really saying, well, let's go and see what we can achieve with this. I think where we're at already in achieving this is technologies to reuse liquid streams from farming. If you think about a set of cows, for example, or a lot of pigs, they're producing urine and solid manure. That, of course, will typically nowadays be just put straight back on to the field with a surface spreader. The problem with that is it's giving so much up into the atmosphere because it's covering all the surfaces, and the main pollutant there is ammonia. What they're doing in some parts of Europe now is, and this is actually curiously enough driven by the nitrates directive. We've got another link between air pollution and another policy domain. They couldn't put more than a certain amount of organic manure onto the field. They would pay somebody else to take it away. The guy that's taken it away now has a bit of money and the manure. First off, he's doing anaerobic digestion and getting some methane off it. Secondly, what's left is a liquor, which is rich in nitrogen and phosphorus. They warm it a bit, strip off the ammonia and put it together with an acid and sell the product back to the fertilizer companies. You've actually got the basis of circular economy going. That is already happening. Of course, it's a question of how to get it profitable. I think the next one with the NOx come from the other angle entirely, our vehicle exhausts. All our technologies really, to date, are focusing on turning that NOx NOx back into atmospheric nitrogen. That's the form N2. That's 78 per cent of every breath we take is N2, but it's completely unreactive, not much use for anything apart from providing a nice stable atmosphere. If we can get that NOx and turn it into nitrate, again, we've got a potential resource. That is where we're still at the cusp of development because that's a long way away from yet making that economic into the future. Imagine the world's nitrogen oxide emissions. That's about 40 million tonnes, so I'll say that that's something like about $40 billion worth a year of NOx, which we're currently treating as pollution. In the future, the question will be, can we then improve our technologies to wash that out commercially and then, of course, bring down the price of air pollution abatement? The roadside verge is one, as I think is an interesting one. The challenge that we face again with these will be to make them economic in a way that whoever's managing, be it a roadside company or a farmer, gets enough to make it worth his while. Take, for example, what would be coming out of field drains. Of course, if that's not been run well, they may have substantial nitrate leaching. I think it's a challenge for the future to capture that nitrate leaching and get it back into the farm and back onto the crop where we want it. Forgive me for being so stupid, but my chemistry is so out of date. What's the equation that takes N2O to nitrogen plus oxygen? How do you split up that molecule into a piece of chemistry somewhere, although I don't remember what it is? There's several ways of doing it. The first thing to realise is that nitrogen is a bit challenging because it's got these several forms. The first form is the N2, two nitrogen atoms together. That's 78 per cent of every breath we breathe. The next you just mentioned was N2O, and that's a greenhouse gas, so that's really unreactive. Once we've lost that, it's really hard to do much with it. N2O, and then the next one is NO, and that's nitric oxide, and that's the one that forms very rapidly to form nitrogen dioxide, so it's the one we're used to in the cities. If you add a bit more oxygen, you can convert that NO2 into nitrate, which is NO3. Add one more oxygen, and you might do that by a number of ways, but basically an oxygen-rich source, to convert that to nitrate. Scott Hamilton wants you in there. I just wanted to make the observation and answer to your question. The simple answer is no. Right now, there's no technology to remove NOx from the atmosphere at roadside that would align with the CAF's objectives of reducing exposure to NO2. There's no technology, and the compounding factor is that we're not just traffic emissions, we're a complex mixture of NOx, volatile organic compounds, particles, metals. I would imagine there would be an issue of having to deal with those sort of nasties alongside the thing that you want to keep, but right now there's no technology to rely on. No, but there is a simple natural technology of grasses, obviously. Absorb these nitrogen compounds, and that's there to manifest that. To see it probably sulphur as well helps the growth of the grasses, and therefore environmental enhancement such as grass or trees by the roadside, presumably that captures some of those gases. Is that not the fact? I mean my experience, primarily I'm an air quality modeler and atmospheric scientist, and to my experience thus far has been that grass has absolutely no effect on concentrations at roadside. Trees can have an effect, but it can be a compounding effect of slowing down wind speed, which increases concentrations of some gases. So it's not, there's no straight forward effects unfortunately. Reducing emissions as a source is the most reliable way to deal with this issue, not to deal with emissions once they've been released from the source. I don't want to get bogged down in this, but Mark Sutton, do you want to come back in that brief? Yeah, just come back with a quick one. I think actually we agree broadly, and the key thing is once it's out in the atmosphere, it's hard to deal with. You want to keep it either not emitting or in your source or capture that source. In the case of vegetation to recapture near roadside verges, we have to make a distinction here between there are higher levels near roadside verges, which means the dose to that vegetation will be bigger than if it hadn't been near a road. That can start having biodiversity effects if you're trying to protect biodiversity near roads, but quantitatively, quantitatively, in terms of the fraction removed from the air, it would be very modest, very small. This debate about trees in the urban environment when it comes to NOX is a challenging one. The main benefit or threat actually will be through the dispersion effect. If you're the other side of the trees, the air may have been dispersed better and you'll have better air quality on the other side of the trees, but if you're in a street canyon protected by trees, you'll have higher concentrations. The last distinction to make is that the different gases have different removal rates that NO, NO2, coming out of cars deposits very slowly. That means there's very little potential for recapture. The ammonia deposits faster. There is some ammonia coming out of catalytic converters as well, so it depends on your gas. It was just to mention the fact that we have in Glasgow introduced two, what they call, city trees this year, which are freestanding moss walls, if you like, which are planted with particular types of herbs and mosses that are shown to be more effective at capturing pollutants from the air. These are freestanding units that are much cheaper to install than just planting a tree within an urban environment. They are self-contained, so they capture their own rainwater, their solar power that pumps through them, and there may be an option for us to introduce more of them in the future. That sounds fascinating. Can I just ask you a further question? The Hope Street hotspot, as I understand it, the monitoring station is very close to a taxi rank. Is that the case? Or maybe the taxis are close to the monitoring station. They are further away now than they used to be because we put new bollards up to try to stop the taxis backing up to it. The Hope Street is a very busy street, and the taxis contribute to the levels of pollution within it. The monitoring station is capturing everything that is within that street, and the modelling that has been done on air quality in Hope Street takes account of that. So it is not skewed by the fact that the taxi is also close by? It is capturing the correct levels of pollution in the street. Given the comments that you made earlier about issueing fixed penalty notices outside schools, has the council taken any action at that type with the taxi rank if they find taxis at idling? We have taken a lot of action against taxi drivers and bus drivers to the point where they recognised the enforcement officers before they see them. There is a problem with taxi ranks, and the official guidance says that the vehicle has to be idling unnecessarily, and that is generally taken as being over a couple of minutes that has been sitting there. It does not have to be two minutes. If the driver is outside smoking a cigarette and his engine is on, he can get a ticket straight away, but it is idling unnecessarily. In the ranks, they move up so quickly in the ranks that they do not stay stationary long enough for us to issue a ticket, because if we are timing them, it is literally 30 seconds and they creep up the rank, and you have to start the clock again, you are not able to issue them with a ticket. Okay, it is good to get that on the record. Kate Forbes, you want to continue? Yeah, I have got two final ones, and I will ask them together in the interest of time. The first one directed at Dennis Milligan, followed by David Duffy, and it's to do with the studies that have been carried out into the impact of domestic wood burning on air quality. Is it possible to estimate how much wood is burnt domestically in Scotland and to differentiate the amount burnt in open fires, approved wood burning stoves, and unapproved stoves, question 1, and then question 2, and this is a free-for-all, whether you believe the Clean Air Act of 1994 effectively deals with emissions and is it adequately enforced, and how do you think it should be amended? Dennis Milligan and then David Duffy. The Bayers study looking at domestic wood usage in 2015 showed that 40 per cent of the wood burned in Scotland was actually burnt in open fires, and we're obviously arguing that's the worst way to burn wood, in that if you control the burn, you can control the emissions that are coming from it, because most PAM from wood burning is due to incomplete combustion of the wood, so in open fire you have lots of incomplete combustion, so therefore you have more and more emissions. Dr Fuller of Kings College earlier this year presented a study that he'd done across all the monitoring stations in the UK, and he found that the level of wood burning emissions was dropping in each of the cities, so it was dropping slightly both in Glasgow and Edinburgh, and the reason he put down to that was really the replacement of open fires in older stoves with deaf or exempt stoves, so really what we're trying to educate people about now is the new European level for our control for emissions, which is equal design, which is due to come in in 2022 for wood burning stoves. As an association, we're bringing them in now, and we've committed by 2022 to meet the emissions. These will reduce the emissions from a stove by 55 per cent compared to a deaf or a stove, and 90 per cent compared to an open fire or a stove manufactured 10 years ago, so really the technology has moved on and we're able to capture the emissions within the stove before they're released into the atmosphere. Before we get any further, can someone quantify for me the extent to which fires and stoves are part of the problem as a significant contributor to this issue? Is it a minor one? David Duffie. Thank you. It's not completely known because of the way that the stoves come into use. In response to Kate's question, the Clean Air Act gives some exemptions for small control areas and restrictions on types of stoves that can be used in those areas. However, they were set up historically in line with where coal was being delivered and it was to tackle the problem with the Clean Air Act in the past. What's happened to the culture that's been created just now is that people are encouraged to use wood burning stoves or other methods to burn. There's some climate change conflict there with their quality and that we're encouraging people to use what we see as a renewable source, however it's actually producing more pollution if it's used correctly. Part of the problem is that there's a gap within the developmental control of stove installation and that if you already have an existing chimney or an existing pot, then you may not need to have building control, you may not need to have planning permission to put that in, people will put them in without kind of considering planning or neighbours to put the stove units in. So whilst they can be very efficient and also meet air quality targets, it's the unregulated other gap within this. The Clean Air Act had significant consultation questions put on that and certainly the comments back from Rheys and from other agencies have highlighted this during the consultation process, that's where the kind of gap is. Or we believe the gap is, the problem is actually knowing where that's demonstrable to be said, this is the problem here. A lot of CAFs for Clean Air for Scotland is set up towards transport and transport issues rather than looking at, as was suggested, other areas of contribution to pollution, agriculture, domestic burning, heating, and other elements. The perceived problem associated with stove may not be fully understood. My organisation did some research for Scottish Government back in 2008 and the Government published a paper on the subject of wood burning in cities and what that would be, possibly contributing to PM 10 and PM 2.5. Given that that's quite an update now, it's 2008, I think that when we looked last time, we reckoned it was probably a bit of microgram or so of PM 10, something about less than that for PM 2.5 and Edinburgh and Dundee. We didn't look at Glasgow in that study but I don't think there's much reason to suspect that that will have changed very much. That was the last time, I think, that we looked holistically at a large area of Scotland and tried to quantify that number. David Duffey and then Dennis Milligan. Rehys, the professional institute, helps support a forum called SPCCC, where I abbreviated that. It's the Scottish Pollution Control Coordination Committee and it's the engagement of local authorities in SEPA with the Scottish Government officials. And we did have planners coming to speak to at SPCCC on another subject, but they brought up the issue of permitted development rights for installation of stoves to see whether a baseline could be drawn. That was given back to the planners at that time, but we haven't seen anything coming forward. That would help with future developments of sites that we would come across to say, are you meeting the permitted developments right? If you meet the permitted developments right, you don't have to apply for planning permission and you've got something that's satisfactory. However, the problems that come back from the forum, because it represents the 32 local authorities, are for local problems where an unregulated unit's been put in and the chimney height of the exhaust fume is plumbing down and affecting someone else, which, while small contribution to the overall air quality figures for Scotland, does give a very, very local problem that has to get tackled. So, on the one hand, they're meeting perceived building regulations and planning and are authorised by the local authority. They're not impacted and, on the other hand, environmental health, who I'm speaking on behalf of, are coming back and saying you can't have that stove there because it's affecting someone next to it. So, it would be beneficial if there was the gap within the development controlled and also some assistance in informing the public as to what they can do in this area before they go ahead with it. Dennis Milgan. Can I just say two things? One, the first is that in England and Wales it's a notifiable event if you are going to install a stove so building control is immediately involved or else it's handed to a competent person who is obviously, again, authorised to survey and install the stove. So, really, I didn't realise that it wasn't a notifiable event in Scotland, so I think that would be an improvement where the installation was covered properly to make sure that it does do its best to disperse the emissions. Second point was really in terms of the impact of stoves. I rely a lot upon what I learned from King's College and really be the estimate that Dr Fuller pouts out for London and I apologise it's London, but basically he's saying that at a winter time peak of emissions of pay, wood burning would be contributing 10 per cent, but in London 70 per cent of the wood is burnt on open fire. So, again, that's why we had this conversation two weeks ago with him in our London's office and really, you know, they're accepting that the problem there in smoke control there is really is inability to control how to burn the wood. Briefly, David Duffey. There are restrictions within smoke control areas in terms of development and that within a smoke control area you have to have the defined list of stoves, so it has to have a certain efficiency with a smoke control area. Okay, I've got two colleagues looking to ask supplementary questions. Donald Cameron, then Claudia Beamish. Thank you, convener. It's really a follow-up to your question. I'm struggling to hear any concrete evidence as to whether this is a problem in Scotland or not and I think this is essential to the debate. I was going to ask, is there an urban rural issue here and particularly things we've got representative from Glasgow? Do you have, for instance, people complaining about pollution from stoves, from wood burning, et cetera? To what extent, in your experience, is it a problem, just to Vincent McAnally? The answer is yes. We do have people complaining that it's more to do with the odors associated with wood burning than with the pollutants. Is it a huge problem or a large number of complaints? No, it's not, but that's perhaps due to the number of installations that have been put in place. A couple of things that I could pick up on. We don't have open fires in Glasgow. It's a smoke control area right across Glasgow, so it has to be an approved appliance that you're burning it in. My own thoughts on it are the clean air acts when they were introduced in the 50s and 60s. They were probably the most significant pieces of public health legislation introduced in the UK. Because they allowed local authorities to prohibit the burning of solid fuels within their areas and move back towards burning of wood, burning of solid fuels is a backward step in areas where we have concerns over air quality. Now, it's not, it's not, there's no evidence of it being a huge problem at the moment, but it's something that we need to keep a watchful eye on to see whether it continues to become more popular or trendy to have wood burning stoves in your house place. Another issue with it is that they can be laboratory tested to show that they're very clean and how they're run when they're run exactly as they're supposed to be operated. However, we have no control over what people put in the fireplace on a dark night in a tenement where nobody can see what's going into it. There is a natural human tendency to think, oh, just chuck it in. Then what are the emissions that come out from that? There are concerns, but we as a local authority don't have an evidence base to show that it's impacting on levels of pollution at the moment. Just to come back on that, if you were, and this is an unfair question, but if you were to try to portion the percentage of emissions or pollution that you get from stoves in Glasgow, would you be able to put a percentage figure on it? No, and it would vary from street to street, from area to area, but no, I couldn't give a figure. Thank you. One final question in this section, Claudia Beamish. Thank you, convener, and good morning to you all. It's a question for Dennis Mulligan. If you could just highlight for us, for the record, any written evidence you highlighted, the issue about an incentive scheme to encourage the replacement of open fires and older stoves with, as you term it, an eco design ready stove. Is there a tension or a conflict with the renewable heat incentive on that? If you could just briefly explore that with us. Wood burning stoves aren't part of RHI, so really the base found it difficult, but because it's a manual batch-fed stove, it's hard to fit into their model, so there's no incentive there for people to put it in a wood burning stove. The view we have is really to say that technology has moved on so much in the last 10 years and continues to move on that really we felt it was important to try and bring the existing stock up to date, and so we have been in discussions with DEFRA on trying to bring in an upgrade scheme. As yet, those discussions are still ongoing. Again, I can just fill you in that when we again spoke to the Mayor of London's office about the scheme, they got very excited because really they're recognising that within London, even though they have the Cleaner Act, say 70 per cent of the wood burned in London, is actually coming from open fires. So although the Cleaner Act and Smokeless Owns do not meant to burn wood except in an exempted appliance, really a lot of people are just burning wood on open fires and so really the idea of the upgrade scheme is trying to encourage people to move forward because really enforcement seems to be a difficult thing to do in terms of wood burning. That's helpful, thank you. Okay, thank you. Let's move us on to Emma Harper. Thank you, convener. Tomorrow is world COPD day, which is interesting that we've got a debate tonight. I think that some of the members will be speaking on it about COPD and raising awareness. So the poorer air quality evidence is that it exacerbates existing long conditions, especially in vulnerable people. So I think that it's important to highlight that and actually it's interesting that we're having this air quality discussion round about world COPD day. So I'm interested to hear about how does Scotland compare to other European cities, especially European cities that have their leading in active travel, and is the clean area for Scotland's vision of Scotland's air quality being equivalent or the best in Europe is that feasible for us? The air quality story in Scotland is very good in most cases. We have some quite isolated problems with air pollution but generally the country benefits from being surrounded by ocean on three sides. We don't have very many large polluting neighbours. So as for instance the European Environment Agency, they publish each year. Europe-wide statistics and comparisons between regions and Scotland always comes out very favourably in that compared with other European countries. The outlier and that is NO2. We have a very, very low particle climate compared to other countries. I've done a lot of work in China just very recently. They have quite low concentrations of NO2 compared to PM. We are the opposite. We have a lot of NO2 and not very much PM. So at that point, the UK has a very specific issue with using a lot of diesel and the manifestation of that is a lot of NO2 in the atmosphere. However, if you were to take Scotland in the round, Scotland comes up very favourably in comparison with other European countries. Typically, any exceedencies that we have of standards are very marginal. Obviously, with some cases, like Hope Street, we mentioned that there are very, very specifically hotspots and almost an engineering problem as much as anything. Scotland has good air quality compared to other countries and other parts of the world. Angus MacDonald. I'm just picking up on the issue of hotspots. I represent Grangemouth, which, it's fair to say, has had a number of challenges with regard to air quality in the past. There have been a number of breaches, exceedencies of SO2 in my constituency, which has resulted in an AQMA specifically for SO2, and to the extent that any of us have invested just over £70 million in a sulphur recovery unit at the refinery. Clearly, removal of sulphur from fuel is as close to source as possible as a good thing. As I understand it, the UK exceedance levels are higher or more stringent than the EU levels. Any of us have often claimed to me that their breaches were against UK levels rather than EU levels. Could you explain to the committee the difference between the EU exceedance levels and the UK oblique Scottish ones and how they managed to fit in with monitoring? I'm not really an industrial modeler per se, so I don't do much work on SO2, but the standards are more stringent. One of the objectives that are used in the UK does not exist in European legislation. I think that the 15-minute standard is way more stringent on the UK than on Europe. The reason for that is that SO2 has a very acute action on human health, whereas NO2 is more of a chronic contributor to health deterioration. I can't comment on what the rationale was behind adopting a more stringent standard, but yes, it is more stringent than Europe. Mark Sutton, do you want to comment on that? It was just a quick comment on the particulate matter and the relative clean atmosphere of Scotland compared with some other regions in the world. I think that just to reflect on that, yes, we're very happy that we don't have the air pollution of Delhi, but I would say that that's not a reason for complacency and perhaps to make the distinction between meeting a target value and having no air pollution effects at all, because the target values, of course, are an outcome of a set of complex negotiations of how much we're ready to agree to go for, but, as far as I understand from the effects scientists, they are saying that we don't have a threshold for human health impacts of particulate matter. All particles are bad, so even if your particle limit is so many microns to be cubed, if you're a little bit less than that, that doesn't mean you have no impact, there are still impacts. Of course, the other thing with Scotland is, and we've seen this in the air monitoring data and the modelling, is occasionally we do get big high levels of pollution coming in from across continental Europe, and this raises the point that it's a combination of what happens in our city, of our local sources, but also managing our widespread sources across the countryside, across Europe, because the background levels even before they enter the city can be very high. On the subject of cities, is there any league table for one of a better expression about cities, similar cities, to Glasgow and Edinburgh across Europe and how they are performing? If there is, and there are cities doing better than ours, what are they doing differently? I thought that might come to me. Clearly, there was an article in a couple of the newspapers, and over the past three weeks it was suggesting that Glasgow was the worst in the UK for air quality, which came as news to me, someone working in air quality, and I would imagine to most people that have ever ventured further than Glasgow and gone to places like London and Birmingham, where the air quality clearly is much more of a problem than it is within our city. League tables probably aren't able to be used to reflect the differences in air quality because it's not then necessarily looking at the number of people that are exposed to it, the areas that the pollution levels are confined to. For example, Hope Street fails the objective for the annual mean, however, there are no residential properties within it, so the levels are higher, but people don't live in that area, so it's not as bad as maybe an exceedance of an objective in an area where there is a large number of people living or even schools located within it, so there's no real league table as such. I would echo the comments that have been said previously, that air quality within Scotland is generally really good, including within Glasgow. The particulates being identified as the most harmful component of air pollution while we meet the Scottish and WHO objectives for both PM 10 and PM 2.5, which is again that article inaccurately reported on data from 2013. Pollution has dropped in relation to particulates right across Scotland, but in Glasgow as well, and all of the objectives are being met. Okay, Scott Hamilton and then Mark Ruskell wants to come in. I just wanted to make the observation, just really a note of caution I suppose about interpretation of league tables. The WHO publishes a league every year, as I say, the European Environment Agency publishes a league every year. The individual cities are really, the concentrations that are reported on these league tables are very, very sensitive to where the analyser is placed that is reporting the measurements. If Glasgow was being interpreted as, or as Hope Street was representative of the city, it just isn't true, but it is in the league tables, so there is an unfair distinction, I think, to be made when the sites are not sighted exactly under the same conditions, which they are not. There's no way they are across all of Europe. Okay, thank you for that. Mark Ruskell. Yeah, I mean, it's obviously difficult to, if you're going to start comparing and adding in league tables and trying to assess what the impacts are of individual streets on individual people. I mean, I used to work for Hope, I used to work in an office in Hope Street, so I spent about nine hours a day there, so maybe I've had, you know, greater impact in terms of air quality on my health than somebody who's just walking past the area. And I think this debate comes back to health, so, I mean, when you're looking at air quality management areas where you're looking at chasing limit values, what's the health data on that? How many lives do we save if we reduce PM 10 or knocked by a certain value over time? What kind of impact data is there on that? Because at the end of the day, otherwise we're just comparing one city to another or one area to another without any kind of meaningful analysis of what it actually does if we reduce air quality pollution. Scott Hamilton. On a sort of suburban level, like if it was a street or a group of streets within a city, I think the answer to that question is we don't typically make that quantification, although there are methods to do that. Defra published a series of what are called damage costs, but that's, for instance, if you emit a ton of PM 10 in a city, the damage cost to society in pounds is X. The damage cost is way higher for PM than it is for knocks, but we don't typically ever decompose it down to a street level. Individual streets, we're talking about an engineering fix that's required, I think, sometimes rather than a sort of broad strategic fix. David Duffie. If I could maybe add to that as well in terms of complementing the way that the air quality management action planning funds are allocated, you have to justify some of that in terms of a few desigrata measure to say what the quantifiable improvement is. Also, some of the, one of the CAF's statements says that now that the health boards who are looking at health have to include air quality as part of their joint health protection plans, so we're, as a nation, including the health boards with the scientists and the local authorities and transport planners, much better than we were historically. So there is an opportunity for Scotland to improve an already excellent air quality. It has some local hotspots, however, as a whole, Scotland is looking and has to look at joint health partnership plans to consider the impact of the recognised pollutants. So there is work that's at the start just now, and it will see how that develops forward. But just to come back on that, I mean you say Scotland's air quality is excellent, but then there are figures to show that 2,500 people are dying every year because of air quality issues. So is that what excellent looks like, or is it, or is excellent 100 people dying, or 1,000, or, you know, it's difficult to get a sense of what is the goal that we're actually chasing here, what is an acceptable level of death from air quality that we can then say, tic, we've done that. That's great, move on. Same as the other scientists have possibly said, and they haven't said that there's a target to reach and you will achieve what we seem to be on the journey towards improving as a whole. Even the title of Cleaner Air for Scotland doesn't put an end point to it. So as risks to human health change in the past, it was quite apparent that where smogs and pollutants were causing deaths because they were instantaneous, this is more chronic conditions that we're struggling from just now. So over the matter of improving air quality and a contribution to improving quality, we will by default improve the numbers of health. What I'm saying in terms of excellent air quality is supported by the other colleagues in that Scotland as a whole has very good air quality, but we have areas where we have to tackle is what we get back through our membership and also from all the local authorities. Emma, do you have further questions? Yeah, just a couple of quick ones. I probably should have declared my interest as a registered nurse as well because I'm asking all these health stuff. This is probably for Vincent McNally. You were talking about how people in Glasgow would get upset if you gave them a fixed penalty ticket outside the schools, if they're idle in their cars. Do you think there's adequate resources directed at guidance and information for people to understand why this is really important? Is there enough resource into it? My second question would be what would a low-emission zone for Glasgow look like? Anatomically, would it be 20 kilometres the way Antwerp have launched theirs this February? It's 20 kilometres city centre, parking ride, photographing licence plates. What would it look like? Okay, I'll take the resources one first. You could always have more resources for engaging with the public and getting a message across. It's a key deliverable within the CAS strategy in terms of communications and that's to be done across Scotland clearly. Within our own local authority, Glasgow works in co-operation with the neighbouring authorities to run a no idling campaign every year. The extent of that campaign is limited by the funding that we receive through the grant that we get from the Scottish Government. We're grateful for it. If we had more, we could do more advertising than awareness raising. In the past, we've run television, radio adverts, newspapers and billboards. This year, the funding meant that we were limited to billboards and the back-of-buses and so on to try and encourage people to switch their engine off. Again, back to the city tree part of that, while it's helping to clean the air or remove pollutants from it, the actual structure has information on panels on the side of it to encourage the public to visit air quality websites, to be aware of what they're doing, their contribution to pollution levels. It's also about raising awareness. There's lots more to be done. I know that SIPA has engaged with a lot of schools. That's an excellent idea to try to encourage the kids to nag their parents into walking them to school. Certainly, my kids prefer to walk or use their scooters to go to school. There's more to be done. The more resources that we have, the more we can do to move on to low-emission zones. That's a huge question. What's going to be done? What's going to look like? It went through our committee at the end of September. I think that it was 29 September. There was an agreement in principle to put a low-emission zone in 2018. That will be towards the end of 2018, before that low-emission zone is put in place. The exact details of what it looks like will be subject to the delivery group that's been formed, comprised in the various parts of Glasgow City Council, the transport guys, environment guys, the people from Equalities, planning, legal procurement. It's a huge working group that's been formed with that. It also includes outside agencies such as Transport Scotland, SIPA and SPT. In addition, we have a delivery forum being set up specifically to engage with stakeholders, fleet operators, bus operators, chamber of commerce and anybody else that will be impacted by the low-emission zone when it comes into place. It's not really for us to just say that that's how a low-emission zone is going to look at this stage. We need to engage with those stakeholders, get feedback from that and help shape the low-emission zone so that it will be effective when it comes into place. Having said that, it's quite clear that the low-emission zone's boundary at the moment that's being considered is approximately equivalent to the existing city centre air quality management area. That's not to say that it will be exactly that, but it will be approximately that. If you don't know Glasgow, that's the area that's bounded by the M8 to the west and north, the Clyde to the south, and then it's the salt market high street area to the east, but that's approximately as yet to be confirmed exactly where it will be, and that will be subject to further work through the delivery group and delivery forum. Shared right into the low-emission zones, and I want to develop that in a second with David Stewart. Mark, a certain Eurobrief comment to make. Yes, it's a quick response to Mark Ruskell's challenging question, and I tend to think that, as a scientist, we can't tell you how many deaths are acceptable. That's probably back in your court. What I do think is this whole discussion on Scotland having relatively good air quality, whatever relatively means compared to others, is only one way of looking. It's the way of looking. It says how much we affected by air pollution. Of course, our emissions are going up into the air and in the international context, contributing to a higher background in other parts of Europe. Our air emissions are all contributing to air pollution problems, particularly the large-scale secondary particulate matter in other parts of Europe. It's not just a question of, we've got relatively good air quality so we don't have a problem, we have a problem because we're contributing to other people's air pollution across Europe as well. Okay, thank you. David Stewart, do you want to explore the low-emission zones as you know? Right, thank you, convener. Can I focus specifically on the low-emission zones and can start with Mr Macanally for understandable reasons, but then throw open to the panel as a whole? The first question, Mr Macanally, is, will you have the LAZ up and running by next year? The LAZ will be in place for 2018. That's what's in the committee paper that's been passed Glasgow City Council. Thank you. I think in May, when you gave evidence, you said, and I quote, a pilot of the low-emission zone should be dependent on what resources and funding will be available, as yet we do not have that information. Have you moved on considerably since you made that statement in May? Not in relation to funding. The funding is not clear for the low-emission zone. That will be expected in the 14th of December. I think that the Scottish Government's budget announcement will be there. We should be clearer then about what resources will be available to it. What I'm saying is that there will be a low-emission zone in place for 2018. That's exactly what it will look like and how ambitious it will be. It will depend on the resources that are made available and it will be subject to further discussions as the delivery group progresses. One of the issues that you may have picked up in the previous evidence that we have taken is about the use of technology. As I understand it from London, there is vehicle recognition technology that can detect registration numbers and detect if they are your six or not. I understand that you have that technology for bus lanes in Edinburgh. Do you have that technology in place now that would do a 360 degrees around a potential LEZ in central Glasgow? We have ampr cameras that are linked to our bus lane enforcement. Yes, we currently have that. Are they in place now that would allow us to have sufficient for a low-emission zone? No, they are not. Clearly, that is a budgetary issue. You would need to know what budget is available in order for you to roll out that technology. Even if you had the budget today, presumably that is quite a big technological leap to have it all up and running even in 12 months' time. Is there a chance that we could have an LEZ in name only in Glasgow next year to come into force a couple of years after that? The low-emission zone will be in place for 2018. When will the enforcement come in? Even once the low-emission zone is in place, there will need to be a sunset period for businesses and owners of vehicles to have their vehicles compliant. It is unrealistic to expect that, as of 2018, we would be expecting 100 per cent compliance for all buses, trucks and cars in the low-emission zone to meet that standard when you are talking about such a large area. There has to be a time for the business community and for fleet operators to get their vehicles of a standard that will be compliant. Have you looked at best practice? There is an argument about that, but my experience in London is that they are quite far forward, obviously, with the congestion zones away back in time, the ultra-low-emission zones bringing and so on. Have you shared experiences with other cities? Because LEZ is not exactly new. Across Europe, we have got LEZs. There is an argument that we do not need a pilot at all, but have you looked at best practice and said that they made a mistake on that and we would not do that? Have you looked at what the positives and negatives are with LEZs? Yes, we have done that. We have been doing that in Glasgow for quite a while. One of the things that has become apparent is that, because we have a problem with the N02 and not the PM-10, the emission standard that we require is Euro 6 for diesel vehicles, whether it is heavy duty Euro 6 or Euro 6 for passenger cars and Euro 4 for petrol. That is a very demanding standard. That is much higher than is being asked for anywhere in the rest of Europe and is equivalent to what is being asked for in the London ultra-low emission zone. The current low emission zone in London does not ask for emission standards as high as what we will be asking for in Glasgow. The ultra-low emission zone will be similar to that. The means by which it would be in place would be automatic number plate cameras. That is something to be applauded. We should congratulate you for having a high standard. What a reasonable sunset period would be? It would be unfair to say at the moment because we have to engage properly with the stakeholders. The idea of the low emission zone being put in is that there has to be proper engagement with all of the stakeholders. It is not for us, it is just a local authority to say that this date will come in without any consultation or engagement. Are there two questions that arise from that ballpark? Are we talking about a couple of years? Are we talking about five years? Are we talking about 10 years? Have those conversations started already? The conversations have started with some of the stakeholders through the engagement process that has been going on through both the car strategy and what has been done at a local level by Glasgow City Council. I would think that you would be talking about the medium term for some vehicles. For buses, for example, you can retrofit a bus, so you can fit a new exhaust system onto it. If you have a van or a car, you need to replace that vehicle, so they clearly need to be a longer period for the sunset period for owners of those vehicles to make them compliant. Can I just bring you back to the retrofitting that you have predicted on the next point? I seem to remember you raised before that Glasgow had an incentive scheme for retrofitting buses. Was I correct on that? We tried to offer grant funding for buses to be retrofitted. We offered 80 per cent of the cost of retrofitting a bus. It was funds that were made available from Glasgow City Council, the Scottish Government and SPT, and we had no uptake or interest from any bus operators. We had interest, but nobody went through with it. I am extremely surprised about that. Obviously, bus companies—we have had evidence, obviously—know that they will have an LAZ, know that they will have Euro 6. There are some knowns on that. Why are they not taking up this excellent offer? I should be clear about that. That was a few years ago, and this was before a low-emissions zone was on the cards. That could be a different context. One of the bits of evidence that we have taken, as you will know, is that the worry is that, once we create LAZs throughout Scotland, we will have Euro 6 compatible buses in the LAZs. However, there will be a trickle-down system where older, more run-down buses, if you like, are in areas outwith the LAZs, which we do not want. There are also wider issues about whether companies have to increase their charges for buses or lose availability in routes. You will find that people will no longer be able to have the bus choices, but that is an issue for another day. Once the LAZ is announced, is the incentive scheme still up and running? That will be subject to the funds that will be made available, I believe, in December. We do not have a budget for retrofitting buses at the council. Now that money, as I said, was a number of years ago and there was no uptake in it. We ended up buying two fully electric buses for provision within Glasgow, so they run on the 100 service within the city. The point about grant funding being made available for retrofitting buses is that now that there is a low emission zone coming into place, I would think that there would be interest in uptake of the grant funds. The funding being made available for bus operators is going to be key to delivering a successful low emission zone, because the feedback from the bus operators understandably is that, if they need to spend £15,000 to upgrade a bus, and several hundred buses need not be done, there will be an inevitable increase in charges and bus fares. That is the last thing that I want as an air quality specialist is to see people being put off using public transport and deciding to go back to using their car. In terms of displacement, I do not think that that will be as much of a concern for a couple of reasons. We are talking about the older buses that are in the areas that we are having recorded in the highest levels of pollution being targeted first, so that would seem appropriate that that is where to target the effort. The buses do not need to go anywhere else. They can be retrofitted with a new exhaust system, so they can still have the same bus with that exhaust system running in that place. The benefits from those buses extend beyond the immediate low emission zone in Glasgow, because the buses run in a number of different areas. The final point on that is that low emission zones are to be expected in a number of cities in Scotland. That is the good thing about that. There would be no point in displacing them when other cities then come on board and decide that they are going to have a low emission zone. That is very helpful. I will make a final question to all the panel. There is also an argument that LEZ should include private vehicles as well as commercial, and emissions may be looked at as per passenger, as opposed to per vehicle. Can I ask the other panel members, including Mr Mackanally, what their views on using private vehicles to be subject to LEZs? It is a very pertinent question, the question of private vehicles. Much of the reason why we are sitting here today is because we have a measured problem with air quality in our cities and towns. We are 100 per cent sure that most of that problem is arising from too much diesel in the car fleet and the wrong place at the wrong time in the wrong technology. Although the aims of the CAFs are admirable, there is a fundamental problem in how we fuel our private vehicles in the UK right now. To be very blunt about it, no diesel, no problem. We have done a lot of work overseas where we have similar concentrations of NO2 to Scotland, but very, very, very much higher PM10 concentrations. It is because they do not use diesel. If we could reverse the dieselisation process from 15 years ago, whatever it was, our air quality problems in our cities would go away overnight almost. Just on the cars then, yes. It was within the committee paper that went past the Glasgow that cars will be included in subsequent phases of the low emissions zone. Just to completely echo Scott's comments on the dieselisation of the fleet, that is the reason that we have the problem that we do at the moment. There are still tax incentives to drive diesel cars. The MOT tests that the vehicle is going for and does not test for NOx emissions. There are big problems with the diesel fleet that are not going to go away overnight. Okay, thank you. It is more an observation than a question. However, what has not helped confidence has been, Mr McMillan made this point in another context, is the difference between ideal lab conditions for diesel vehicles and the on-the-road reality. Obviously, there have been companies that have falsified the results, which clearly have set the confidence. However, I note in Scotland that diesel vehicle private car sales have plummeted. Clearly, the individual drivers are taking this aboard. I do not have a panel of any general points on the difference between lab conditions and real life. The observation that I would make about diesel engines is that the manufacturers, the subsequent iterations of Euro 6, CND that are due to command over the next few years, are very difficult technological challenges to get to the emission levels that are being promised even in the subsequent iterations of Euro 6. There is some confidence in that the testing regime has been tightened up to include real-world driving conditions, but it is a tough, tough task. If we get to Euro 6, CND and we still have an issue, we just have to use less diesel. It is not Euro 6 diesel, it is Euro 5 diesel, it is less diesel, just full stop, because even a brand new diesel car is going to emit probably 10, 15 times more knocks on a brand new petrol car. Going back to first principles, that solves the issue overnight. I have had a question about can one retrofit diesel cars? Do you talk about retrofitting buses or is it just not economically viable? It is not economically viable to do that. The cost of retrofitting a bus is about £15,000 per bus. That is the cost of the technology. Then it takes up a lot of space, as you can imagine, and a bus is chassis and engine compartments. There is a lot more space to fit that into it. It is just not doable for cars and for smaller vans. Okay, thank you. That is good to get that to clarified. Can I just move on a little bit and ask a panel a combined question around whether you would support congestion or other direct charging to discourage driving into or within urban areas? Also, perhaps let us take in the issue about the uptake of electric vehicles and the development of charging infrastructure. For example, would you be in favour of a requirement for all new build to have an electric vehicle charging point within? Who wants to go first? David Duffy. Mine, because mine probably won't be as scientific as the other giants are. Yes, we'd support any measure that's going to improve public health. If congestion charging is part of a strategy that's risk-based to reduce that, then yes. However, we wouldn't see that as the first point, because it would have other impacts. On the second part about widening the electrical vehicle infrastructure, more than support, making that more available to encourage the use of the EV. On the first question of congestion charging, I'm not a politician or a transport engineer, so I can only really speak to the environmental benefits. We can think of the city as a big box. Essentially, the less emissions we put in that box, the less exposure to high concentrations of pollution. We have congestion charging, and we'd probably reduce the emissions in that box, so therefore I would definitely support it. Electric vehicles. I think that in cities like Glasgow, and I speak from personal experience, I live on the third floor of a flat, a tenement building, and I just can't get an electric vehicle because I can't charge the vehicle. I think that there's a big challenge in somewhere like Glasgow where a lot of the population lives up high. To even charge a vehicle, I would buy one tomorrow if I could make it work. Any more infrastructure is a good thing. There is work being done in Glasgow at the moment, because we have a lot of tenemental properties, and putting in that charging network is a challenge. However, there is new innovative work being looked at and how we can do that. Within new developments, it's always a struggle for us to try and encourage developers to put in charging points, because they maybe don't think that there's going to be the demand that we do. We build it and people are more likely to use it in the future. More charging points are definitely a good thing. On congestion charging, I'm just talking purely from a personal point of view, because it does become a political issue when you get to congestion. I believe that at both national and local government levels, there's no desire to see any road user charging being introduced. From an air quality point of view, anything that cuts down on congestion will have a positive impact on air quality. Is there anybody else who wants to come in on that? A brief follow-up point to Dave Stewart's point about cars. How significant are cars as a component of air pollution within our cities? Is it more about cars' role in creating congestion, which means that our freight and buses are stationary and emitting more? I'm just trying to get a sense of where cars sit within the overall problem that we have and what contribution they're making to this problem. Well, we've got quite a lot of new modelling data that's been provided through part of our work that we're doing, looking at low emission zones, and it varies from street to street. So on a street-like great western road, cars will be contributing 70 per cent of the levels of air pollution that we're recording, but then you go to Hope Street and it's 70 per cent from buses. So it depends on the type of traffic and how it's moving in that area, but where it becomes interesting is that in Great Western Road, while cars are the main source of pollution, the objective is being met. So it's a mixed picture and within the city centre there are some streets where it's half and half cars, half buses, but what's important is from the car component it's over 90 per cent diesels that are producing the emissions. It's not the petrol vehicles within that, and we've got some data, I'd be happy to send on if the panel would be interested in seeing it, which quite clearly shows the breakdown of the different types of fleet, whether it's buses, taxis, HGVs, vans, and even within the cars component how much of that is diesel and how much of that is petrol, and it's the diesel cars, so it's diesel cars and buses that are the main issues within Glasgow. Okay, Scott Hamilton and then David Duffey. The Scottish local authorities, indeed all UK local authorities have been looking at this problem since 1997 and have been tasked through the local air quality management legislation to conduct what's called source apportionment. Every local authority in the country that has an EQMA will have gone through the process of apportioning the relative importance of sources to inform local action planning, so there's a huge amount of evidence already outside the CAF's scheme. I talked to any council, asked them if they have source apportionment data, they probably have got it, and it would echo exactly what Vincent said about diesel cars and heavy traffic or the two. David Duffey. And Scott just said what I was going to. Excellent, thank you very much. Let's move very briefly, Mark Ruskell. No, so I was going to move on to another topic. It's just a final question about, we haven't talked about Brexit yet, but I'm wondering what the panel would think of any impact Brexit will have on air quality in Scotland. Mark Ruskell. So it was, I think, December 2016 that was agreed the revision of the national emissions ceilings directive, which was, of course, a major negotiation to take forward the previous international commitments of our national level for the whole of the UK of emissions and the rest of Europe. So presumably, well, one can ask the question, where would that stand in a Brexit world? Among the things that did, of course, it committed the UK and other countries to further reductions of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides and ammonia. The ammonia from agriculture, the others from industry and transport. So perhaps those commitments may not be existing in the future, I'm not certain. The other thing is it did on the agriculture side, is it had a specific annex about national action plans on taking action on reducing agricultural ammonia emissions. That annex was not in the 1999 one, so it was a new commitment. And, of course, presumably that may or may not go forward in a post-Brexit world. So we really are in a, we've heard a lot about the city level pollution in this discussion, particularly the nitrogen oxides. And yes, the nitrogen oxides, high source from cars, also industry, the ammonia contributing to the particulate matter from agriculture is more of that high level of background PM that's coming into our cities, meaning that we've got even worse levels. And really the European legislation together with the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, they have an approach, but it's not as strong as the European one. So without that European one, the UK legislation is missing and something else would need to be put into place. Anyone else on Brexit? I think that the main observation that I would make is if we can retain control of both the ambient standards that we have right now and retain control of the emissions sources, then there's no reason for it to affect us at all. Effect is in the sense that concentrations don't change or continue to improve if we lose, if we don't have control over either the standards which tend to come from Europe and then the Scottish Government admirably adopt even more stringent targets. If that is lost through the process then our benchmarks suffer and maybe inevitably that results in a deterioration of air quality, but if we can control both things, the emissions and the standards, there's no reason to suspect that it may make things worse, but we don't know. Okay, thank you very much for that, Mark Ruskell. Thank you. Can I come back to the issue of air quality management areas? We've seen a trend in Scotland of increasing designation of AQMAs. Is that a good or a bad thing? I think that one of the sort of long standing, I'm going to use the word problems, I don't know if it's a problem, but there's no real compulsion on local authorities to adopt a consistent approach when declaring AQMAs. One local authority might choose to declare the whole boundary of their entire local authority when actually they've got maybe two or three hotspots, whereas some authorities may choose to create an AQMA that's almost like a ribbon that follows the road. I don't really know what the pros and cons of both those approaches are. I wouldn't always associate the increase in prevalence of AQMAs with a deterioration in air quality. The observation that I would make is that these local authorities, it takes time to investigate all the potential problems in their area, and that's the AQMA development, maybe a manifestation of sort of getting round to looking at areas through the passage of time. That's my observation. It's not necessarily indicative of a worsening of overall air quality. Vince Magnalia and David Duffie. I would just make the point that in Glasgow we've revoked our city-wide air quality management area, and we are looking because the air quality targets are being met, and we are now looking to revoke our parkhead cross air quality management area if the figures for 2017, when they are completed, show that that area continues to meet the objective for NO2. We will revoke that. So where can I go in the opposite direction in reducing the number of air quality management areas because of the improving picture in air quality? I don't really want to comment on other local authorities too much other than to say that there is now more and better air quality monitoring equipment that might be assisting local authorities in identifying areas as being a problem that they weren't aware of previously. David Duffie. Something that Vince is saying there and also some of what Scott has said in that the knowledge or awareness of how to be looking for these problems possibly wasn't quite as embedded in all the local authority in the band of my health in various professions. Air quality has also went up the agenda. The awareness and the wider community is greater. The infrastructure is miles better now than it was before in terms of the monitoring. The rehass would say that I wouldn't necessarily say that there's worse but what we've actually done now is we're better informed as to where those sites potentially are. Identifying the hot spots of the problem areas are better now because we probably weren't aware of them in the past. We've got the scientific backup to be able to say that they're partly because of the extension of the monitoring site but also because of the experiences of other authorities and other professionals looking at them. Examples where an air quality management area has been revoked, what's been the package of investment or measures that have been put in place and are councils adequately funded in order to achieve that? Well, more funding always finds a way to be invested in improving air quality. I think that it has to be noted that generally across Scotland levels of pollution have been reducing. Vehicles, although there is still an issue with diesel vehicles, are cleaner now than they used to be. Certain areas have less vehicle use than there was before, more public transport use, more people cycling, walking. There's a broad range of measures that have been introduced through our air quality action plan that we'd like to think have contributed to the reduction in pollution that has allowed us to revoke these air quality management areas. The more investment that is put in sustainable and public transport, the better we'll see the air quality pollution levels reduce. Mark Sutton. Yes, just a quick one, not to forget what's called the industrial emissions directive, previously known as the integrated pollution prevention and control directive, which deals with large installations that goes from anything industry-like and even includes very large pig and poultry farms. The implications of that industrial emissions directive is very busily looked after by CEPA, and I'm not aware of any national legislation that is currently in existence to do the same job. Mark Sutton, you mentioned in your evidence that there's a need for a step change in the level of communications about air quality. Can you expand on that? What do you think that she entails? That particular evidence was given by my colleague Stephen Rice, so I'm now trying to think what you're reading into his text. In terms of public communication, perhaps, and around how stakeholders are involved in tackling air quality issues, or being perhaps more aware of them? Yes, I think perhaps one of the points he was making was the need to communicate across boundaries. One of the things we haven't heard of yet much about is the ecosystem impacts of air pollution. We've talked a lot about human health impacts. In his evidence, he drew in the impact, for example, of tropospheric ozone pollution, which is the nitrogen oxides come out of the cars in the industry, goes together with volatile organic compounds. Ozone is produced in the air we breathe. That's leading to about a 5% loss of yield in many of the crops across the UK. It's got agricultural consequences. That's something that, for example, isn't strongly in the current narrative, which is very much just dominated by the human health effects of people in cities. In that, he was drawing attention to the fact that there are multiple other benefits that we should be thinking of. Impacts also on semi-natural ecosystems. Scottish Natural Heritage is charged with protecting nature reserves of Cossackotland and is currently designated as special areas of conservation, or triple SIs. Many of those will be being impacted by the same air pollution that is affecting human health. We've got crops, nature and ecosystems. Perhaps he was wanting to encourage towards a holistic health ecosystem perspective that joins these all together, and there's a higher level of awareness needed of those connections. I understand that point. I think that there was another point made about health services, educational institutes, whether we have the right public information available within our cities and towns about air quality. I don't know if anybody wants to comment on that in terms of what a step change in terms of communications might look like, particularly as we move to roll out local low-emission zones. I think the observation that I would make, and I'm not a communications specialist, but I think a lot of the successes that we're seeing right now are around education and schools, and perhaps if pollution was a large component of school curriculums. The trouble with a very direct method of communication of air quality conditions in a city right now is the measurements that are leading to that are subject to some uncertainty. It's actually very technically difficult to give a reliable picture of the air quality conditions in a street at any given moment. What about public advice? If there was potential for a public advice scheme to not buy diesel cars, that would be a fantastic start. I keep coming back to this point about diesel, but it's the elephant in the room, unfortunately. The trouble with maybe advice, depending on how that's framed, a lot of the problems that are arising from vehicles are not the fault of the person that bought the vehicle, they're the fault of an engine that's not doing what it's supposed to do in the real world. That cuts across enforcement and education. You get an enforcement notice for a car that you thought was clean. What do you do then? It's a very difficult challenge. The nub of this, isn't it? It's a trust issue. I'm a diesel driver. I bought one because I was told that it was better for the environment, and many of us did. It's almost the same people coming back and telling a different story. You can understand why perhaps some of the public would be very sceptical about the essential advice that we need to give them. I think that the dieselisation obviously was a result of a drive to reduce carbon emissions. It is demonstrably less carbon intensive, but it is demonstrably more toxic, more intensive. I guess that's a question for the policy makers, because they conflict, no doubt they conflict, but it is what it is. Richard Lyle, do you want to come in on that point? You just discovered the silver bullet. Let's all bring in a law to stop people buying diesel cars and go back to petrol, which, again, a number of years ago, was led. People moved off of that, and I'll declare that I'm a diesel driver also. Basically, if you've not discovered, let's just go back to petrol cars and we'll do away with all this pollution, but affect the carbon. Exactly. If there was no such thing as diesel cars, we would have no compliance issues with probably NO2 at all. We don't really have compliance issues with PM10 any more. It would be a similar picture to lead. Overnight, we took lead out of a few. Ambient concentrations are dropped instantly. The same thing would happen with removal of diesel from the private car fleet. Not just the private car fleet, but light goods vehicles also. Absolutely. Every vehicle that it's a viable technology, I don't believe it's viable for heavy goods vehicles or buses, but certainly for light goods vehicles and cars that is certainly viable. That's the point. Not for buses, not for heavy goods vehicles, but they can be a Euro 6 engine that does work in the real world. If we moved to cars, they would be in petrol or electric even better. There would be significant reductions in the levels of pollution. In terms of carbon, the new one-litre turbocharged petrol engines that you can buy now are very efficient. They deliver huge miles per gallon, and there definitely is an argument to say that people should be switching to them if they're doing higher millages. The whole thing about diesel is being better in terms of carbon reduction. Evidence tends to show that people who buy diesel cars then drive more miles in them because they can get better miles per gallon. They buy heavier four-wheel drive vehicles that are less efficient. I mean, I don't want to get into the realms of conspiracies or how the big industry works, but you can sell more profitable, expensive vehicles by putting diesel engines in them because otherwise the fuel consumptions that I water in to be putting petrol engines in those. I know that there's lots of people around this table that bought diesel cars for the right environmental reasons, but there are a lot of people that bought them purely for economic reasons because they were thinking in their own financial self-interest, and that has to be addressed if we're going to get people to move away from diesel vehicles. Absolutely. Claudia Beamish and John Scott. Thank you, convener. We've touched on resources and the importance of funding for all those projects. Could I ask the relevant members of the panel who want to comment about the development of skills and whether there are the appropriate and necessary skills in both local authorities and public bodies more widely to address the issues that we're talking about today? If not, how can that be best developed? David Duffie. In terms of the rehearse position, we can only really speak about environmental health officers and folk who have elated to the environmental health profession, and there has been a reduction in numbers of those coming through. There have been discussions already with MSPs and connections with that about how we could potentially tackle that in future. Rhearse is attempted to adapt to the situation, to bring forward the environmental health professionals that historically have led in the air quality management area fields, but they also work across other specialisms. There are discussions on going, but we do recognise that there is a problem with those professionals coming through. We could say that local authorities are employing fewer, so we're all subject to those financial impacts within any of the local authorities or other enforcement agencies, but we've tried to work round about it so that we can have a route to provide professionals who could work within this area, but it's only one aspect of a wider profession where environmental health officers don't exclusively deal with air quality. There's food, health and safety noise and other subjects as well. There are talks on going about how we can try to encourage that, and Rhearse would be welcome to help more professionals. Any other quick comments on that on the skills? To think about skills with farmers, because farmers are losing nitrogen from their farm. As I mentioned, it's going up into the air, it's contributing to greenhouse gases, it's contributing to air pollution, it's contributing to water pollution. As the air pollution part, I think the dominant issue is the ammonia still. There have been concerns also raised about nitrogen oxides coming out of soils, that's the same stuff that's coming out of exhausts, and that's a small fraction historically compared with the car exhausts and the factories, but if we make progress with those sources and the nitrogen oxides coming out of farming isn't addressed, it will become an increasing share. We've estimated that up to 20% of nitrogen oxides by 2030 in Europe could be coming from farming soils. I think this points to also education for farmers, many of whom are educated in how to make their business run, but not necessarily educated in the nuances of how to reduce air pollution, so I think there's a case for better information on the technologies that might help them reduce air pollution and might help them save some money at the same time and give them the confidence where they might need to invest in equipment that that equipment will give them a payoff in due course. John Scott then, Scott Hamilton. Just declaring an interest as a farmer with a vested interest in that regard, but farmers are always interested in ways of saving money given the current viability of food production in this country, so you might want to develop that point and the potential for saving money in that regard. The question that I specifically was going to ask earlier before this one kind of hijacked my thinking was food production in terms of agricultural machinery tractors, self-propelled vehicles. Those would probably still have to remain as diesels with them, or is there a new developmental phase there for agricultural machinery? I don't think I have the competence to ask that question, but I can imagine if we can get all sorts of vehicles with electric in the future. Maybe we can with some agricultural vehicles as well. The question will come down to the power requirements for a particular task. What is clear is, I think, that precision agriculture is offering great potential. Of course, if we make better savings with less emission and less emission from fertiliser, less emission from manures, that means more precise and less input of mineral fertilisers. Of course, how much power you need to get a fertilizer application across is going to be very different from how much you need for ploughing your field, so that you may end up in a world where you will need two pieces of kit, one that might still be a diesel for doing some really heavy work, and maybe then some lighter piece of kit might potentially be electric in the future. I don't think that there's going to be a replacement for diesel tractors any time soon, but that's not the issue. They're operating in areas where we don't have air quality concerns. It's the vehicles that are within our built-up urban environments that are causing air quality issues. In terms of the previous question to do with the skill set, I would just add that the Scottish Government has provided training courses for local authority officers to go on, particularly in relation to local air quality management and air quality assessments and so on. They have been invested in some of that. The other thing is that there is a sharing of resources between the Scottish Environment Protection Agency with cities such as Glasgow, Dundee, Aberdeen and Edinburgh to forward the low emission zones. That has been great for us as a local authority to get that kind of level of engagement with the senior scientists within SEPA. I just wanted to make a quick point, going back to the question about education. The observation that I would make—I have a strong involvement with the University of Glasgow. I am a supervised PhD student through a link there. The observation that I would make is that atmospheric science and by extension air quality is a fantastically complex field. I think that what Scotland lacks at the moment is university education programmes on atmospheric science, combustion science, first principles science with specific relevance to air quality. That is the observation that I would make. I could not right now go and do a master's in atmospheric science in Scotland. I would have to leave. Mark Sutton. Caveat to Vincent McNally's comment just now about emissions in rural areas. I think that it is very important that we distinguish the different pollutants and the different impacts in this. If it is a question of direct emission from an exhaust pipe contributing to NO2 or particulate matter, if that is the case and the tractor is out in the field away from people, less impact, fine. If it is a question of the nitrogen oxides coming out of the batter that tractor contributing to secondary particulate matter and all the other emissions that are occurring in the rural environment contributing to secondary particulate matter, those rural emissions then blow into the city and give you a much higher baseline air pollution onto which the local sources then add. I think it would be wrong to say that any emission in a rural environment is not contributing to urban air pollution threats, but we need to distinguish between the primary and secondary pollution issues. Thank you for that. Richard Lyle. Can I pick up on a comment that Vincent McNally made earlier during the process? We have been told in oral evidence that there are only 95 air quality monitors across Scotland, but Vincent McNally said that there are more than 100 in Glasgow. Take it, these are separate types of monitors. We have more than 100 monitoring locations in Glasgow, that is right. I think that 12 of them are fully automatic monitoring stations, so they are all linked to the internet and the link to the Scottish Air Quality website, so you can go in and pull off live data from them. They give us fantastic minute-by-minute data on what levels of pollution are like in that specific area, but there are only 12 of them. We supplement them with a network of diffusion tubes, which are an accepted way of measuring the annual mean for NO2. There are approximately 100 of them at various locations in Glasgow, and we constantly monitor where they are to see whether they need to be moved to a better location, whether we have had years' worth of data where it is shown that the levels of pollution are particularly low. We could relocate them somewhere more appropriate. That is all included in our annual progress report and in our report to the Scottish Government about the levels of air quality that we have within the city. Can I ask the panel, do you think that existing monitoring stations are in the right places and collect the right data to provide a broad picture of air quality across Scotland? Should we have more monitors like—I am very pleased that you have those in Glasgow—and have a broader coverage of the right across Scotland? If the observation that I could make as an air quality scientist, I would much prefer to work with measurements from an automatic station that is subject to European standards of quality assurance and quality control. The measurements are much more reliable, and they offer temporal information across the day that you do not get from passive measurement techniques, like Vincent mentioned. We rely too much in the UK—not just in Scotland, but we rely too much in the UK on passive long-term averages from what is called diffusion tubes, as Vincent mentioned. The uncertainty in each of those measurements is about plus or minus 20 per cent best case. When you have an exceedance of two micrograms, which is less than 5 per cent of an exceedance against the standard, uncertainty on a measurement of 20 per cent plus or minus, my view is not good enough. However, that is what is set out in the UK and Scottish Government's technical guidance, which has been an appropriate way to measure NO2. Undoubtedly, we should have more automatic stations, I think. Anyone else on that? Anybody else? OK. Mr Lyle, any final questions? The other point was agreed earlier—educating the public about equality and educating people, drivers, etc. Should we have more visible equality information next to monitoring systems? You know how you have—slow down, to only do 30, you are going too fast on a panel. Should we not have a panel if I am working by any equality monitoring station? That is a certain level of percentage. Should I not be able to see that, rather than have to plug in somewhere and download it? Should I not be able to see it as I walk by? That is something that we looked into before. We have the internet of things, why not make the information available to people. There are a couple of issues with that. First of all, the minute-by-minute data is unrattified. It needs to go through the system before we can report on it with any degree of confidence. The other thing is that we need to put the equipment on these stations, which should need to be new and maintained, and there would obviously be a cost to that. However, the information is already available. Most people have smartphones that can easily connect to the Scottish Air Quality website, but any monitoring station that they are at that you can just drill down into the area that you are in and look at the nearest monitoring station and pull up the data that is available to you from that. You can also set it up with the Scottish Air Quality website to get emails as often as you like. I am sad that I get one at eight o'clock every morning. That tells me what the monitoring data has been at every automatic monitoring station within Glasgow the previous 24 hours. It also gives you a prediction, a forecast for what the pollution levels are likely to be that day. If you have health concerns, you can register with the Scottish Air Quality's known respond website, which I think sends you texts. If you have underlying health conditions, that will tell you if you are likely to experience levels of pollution where you could avoid it by either staying indoors or even cutting down on any strenuous activity. We are very fortunate that the levels of pollution that we experience in Scotland are generally low all year round. We do not really have many episodes where pollution levels are high. The date is there and people can access it. There probably are ways that could be done better. We certainly looked at it in the past, putting the QR badges on the side of stations where your phone takes a picture on the automatic issue just to make it a bit easier. That has not been followed through on, but in terms of engaging with the public, there probably are areas that we could look to to make it simpler for them to find out what the date is within their area. Would you agree that a level of detail on cleaner for Scotland CAFs annual report is adequate to scrutinise progress and what we are doing? I think so. I think that CAFs has been a really positive development in terms of air quality work that is getting done within Scotland. If people want to read the information that is in it, it will give them a good update on what is happening right across Scotland. My question is on the back of the number of monitors as well, but also the use of data. There is always an argument that we could have lots more monitors of certain types, but do we not have the information and data available from MOTs, car specs on what their emissions are likely to be at different speeds? We have weather reports telling us what the condensation levels are going to be, the humidity, the wind direction or whatever. We have monitors on the road that looks at car speeds, vehicle lengths and the increase use of automatic number plates recognition software. We know what vehicles are moving down Hope Street or whatever street. Is there not scope for using more modelling to provide real-time estimates of what air pollution is? Is that not the way forward? A supplementary point is that we are looking at low emission zones. How much joined-up thinking is there around the digital cities where number plate recognition can be used for traffic management and billing or parking or whatever? Is there any joined-up approach to using big data for everybody's benefit? If so, who should be leading that? I think that the observation that I would make about if I could summarise your first question is, is there enough data? Undoubtedly, there's enough data right now for us that we know the problem, we know where the problems are, we just don't seem to be able to fix them. Although there is an attraction in having more measurements, it's not going to tell us any different answer, sorry, it's not going to delineate the problem any better than it was already delineated. More measurement stations would help with public engagement, and maybe delimiting the scope of problems perhaps, but I think that we already know the problems and we should just get to work to try to fix them. What was the second point? Sorry, I've lost my arm. The second point was regarding everybody getting together because there's lots of data out there compiling it to bring forward. We're talking about our digital cities where the data is all there. Is that being done? We've got lots of different sectors. If it's not being done, who should be leading it? The observation that I would make around that is that it's actually a reason that I've pushed it forward to produce real-time models of pollution in cities. It's certainly something that the organisation I work for. We do it more overseas than here, admittedly, but there's no reason why that couldn't be adopted in Scotland. There already is an air quality forecast in the UK that's previously, my company used to run that programme on behalf of deaf in the Scottish Government, but that's now a cement office, so each day you can get a forecast of air pollution. It's at very low resolution, so you have the same prediction in Glasgow as Hamilton or something like that, but the technology exists, it's just a matter of application. Two points, and the first one I should declare in interest, which is about rural monitoring, because CEH runs the only intensive rural air pollution monitoring site in Scotland. In fact, Riccardo AA paired in a network we work together, they run the single site in England, which is down at Harwell. Compared with the amount of monitoring that's done in the urban environment, that's relatively modest, and I would like to be able to have off the top of my tongue what is the percentage of urban particulate matter that comes from rural sources advected in, and I can't remember it. Is it 60%, 70%? A substantial fraction, so knowing how much is coming in from the rural environment into urban environment tells you how much you should be concentrating on your rural sources as well as your urban sources, so I think that really is an important information source, and we're very happy that those two sites exist already, one in Scotland, one in Auckland. Can I just ask you in that point, since you're talking about baseline figures, how much pollution comes in the air as it comes across the Atlantic, taking the prevailing wind as being south-west? You talk about baseline figures going from agriculture, from the rural areas into the city, but how much baseline pollution is there in the wind and the air as it comes across the Atlantic? It depends on the pollutant form. If you're talking ammonia, it's got a short lifetime, nitrogen oxide's got a longer lifetime and the particulate matter's got a long lifetime, but those lifetimes mean that you get typical transport distances up to a thousand or two kilometres. That means that we have substantial air pollution transport within Europe, but, broadly speaking, the air pollution from North America has been washed out before it gets to us. So not too much problem from North America, but substantial problem when the wind's in the right direction from Europe. Just to come to my second point in response, which was on public communication where I have no interest, well, other than being a citizen. I was very interested when I came into Delhi in India and on the side of the road is a big billboard telling me my air quality in lights and I sit there in my transport vehicle taxi or whatever I'm going in and thinking that's rather interesting that Delhi has this up on a big billboard at several places. They have a SAFA system, S-A-F-A-R, if you want to go online to see that. To me, it's an interesting thing in raising people's awareness and I suspect they probably get rather more visits to their websites as a result of having something like that. Absolutely. Scott Hamilton briefly, Vince. I just wanted to make a point about the question, about the wind direction. We're very lucky where we are. We benefit most of the time from very clean Atlantic air. Clean in the sense of it doesn't have a lot of knocks on it, it doesn't have a lot of particles in it and the particles that are in it are typically from Seasaw or other natural sources. So we are lucky, in a sense. I'll just get back to the point about the data availability. There's more and more sources of data becoming available all the time. I don't know who would be best placed to lead on that. Some of it is more useful than others. For example, the MOT data that comes out isn't really useful because they don't test for the right things at the MOT. For example, diesel vehicles are only tested for smoke capacity, so it's a very crude test to see the levels of black smoke that's coming out of the back of it. It doesn't test at all for NO2, so we don't get any feedback from that. There have been various pieces of technology coming on to the market that allow for, as I mentioned, real-time emissions testing without having to pull vehicles over and test them. It scans the plume that comes out of the back of the vehicle and reports on it how that feeds into the system, how we use that still to be figured out. There's other data sources from things like monitoring Bluetooth travel times across the city. That can help to feed into looking at ways of better resolving traffic congestion in real-time, and that will have an impact on air quality. It is being looked at on a wider basis for UK or Scotland-wide, but it is being considered as part of the work that is being done to fully model the air quality impacts within the cities. Okay, thank you. We need to move on to John Scott. Thank you. I've got a particular question for Mark Sutton, and I would like to ask him what work CEH has done to map and assess the impact of nitrogen emissions to air quality in Scotland and what the results were if you've done that work. You may have already in part answered some of that, but there is a point to this series of questions. Okay. The first off to say is that that work has primarily been focused on the United Kingdom scale, so it's under the lead of DEFRA and the devolved administrations contributing into that. The first step is working out what the emissions are and mapping those emissions. So we work together, again with Riccardo AA, we particularly take responsibility for mapping the agricultural emissions and they will take responsibility on traffic sources, for example. And then sharing various other sources. The first step is to know in agriculture where are your sources. We start with the livestock census data at a parish level, and then with various land cover techniques, modelling that to get it into a gridded form. Those inventories then give us how much air pollution is coming out across Scotland. For many of the sources, we have them at one kilometre with resolution. So there's emissions going up into the atmosphere, and then we're using atmospheric transport models to blow it around and let it come back down. That simulates the air concentrations and also the total amounts coming back down again as a deposition. So those are the kind of tools we're doing and then that I mentioned about the air quality monitoring which provides a validation data to that. The intensive site, which is at Ockancorth near Penicook, is giving data on which we can then test those models, test their validity. So we have a clear view of what's coming up, what's coming down, of course, necessarily with uncertainties as well and some understanding of those uncertainties. Thank you. Would you want to say anything, Scott Hamilton, about Riccardo's contribution to that monitoring or not? It's not a project that I'm specifically involved in, so it'd probably be best to leave that to colleagues. Okay, right, thank you. Again, for Mark Sutton, what policy gaps might there currently be in that? Is there some way that that could be better enhanced and not just for you, given your wide knowledge of this, not just in agriculture? If I look at the bigger scale rather than the city scale and I'm linking back here to discussions that I've contributed to in the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, and they signed a revision of the Gothenburg protocol and then the revision of the National Emissions and Ceilings Directive, which followed that two years ago, and I look at the steps forward that countries have made. They made further steps forward in reducing sulphur dioxide to the extent that sulphur dioxide emissions are so tiny now, by comparison, to the extent that farmers will often be needing to put some sulphur fertiliser on. Of course, that's okay because it means that the sulphur is not depositing under the forest. We've largely got rid of our acid rain problem, so there was a reason for that. The nitrogen oxides, again, they've committed to substantial further reductions. How that is achieved, of course, that's up to the national plans, but industrial sources making progress in particular. Although I will keep coming back to agriculture, I have to do so because the level of commitments made by the countries for agriculture have been very modest by comparison. That, of course, is a social debate, particularly when you've got a subsidised industry that's doing its best to make ends meet, but quantitatively much less ambition has gone into that. I'm not going to say what is the way forward, what is the right way, because when I see a world with tough regulation, I see that that can be rather divisive as well, and it means that people sort of get stuck in the mud and not wanting to do something. Conversely, a world with incentives and let's all work together can be more constructive, but it's fair to say that the UK, for example, committed to something like an 8% reduction in ammonia emissions by 2030. The Netherlands achieved a 50% reduction between 1993 and the present, and so some countries have shown where they really were willing, they could do things. The interesting thing is that the feedback I get from many stakeholders is if you did that here, you would bankrupt us. Yet the interesting thing is that the Dutch farmers are still in business somehow, mysteriously, and I think there's something much smarter going on here that we haven't really realised in this kind of should it be regulation or not or voluntary or whatever. It's how to gradually nudge forward the education towards smarter approaches that we wouldn't have otherwise thought about. So I can't say whether regulation is right or not, but I think we somehow have to be smarter in going forward so that people can see their opportunities bearing in mind that much less has been done in the agricultural sector than in the car sector than in the industry sectors. So whose role would you see that as being the use of nudge theory? I think that most farmers would be up for saving costs, doing things better. Farmers essentially are also very much involved in food production, which is quite important, notwithstanding to food security issues in terms of feeding our nation. Perhaps you'd like to talk a little bit more about the Netherlands, the situation in the Netherlands, what were the key barriers to development and implementation of this better improved policy than the one that you say we have here? They've certainly gone a lot further, and so the Netherlands agreed around 1993, they said, all of our manure will be spread into the soil rather than on the surface. So they committed to injection and the deep injection of manure going into the soil surface. In Denmark, they did that, but then not all the farmers wanted to inject. So other, as a thing developed, other people came up and said, we'll do a combination of acidifying our slurry together with a surface application in what is called a trailing hose. That means it goes out in nice, neat rows, so you've got the philosophy of precision farming of getting it down nice and evenly, but you don't need the energy of getting the stuff into the soil. Now, those two policies on how we spread our muck at the heart of what they've achieved, that's where the big achievement has come. But then onto that, then they've added good manure storage so that all their manures, they don't have open manure storage at all, so they've committed to that. Of course, that comes down to how you design the system, where if you've got an open lagoon, it's going to be much harder to cover it than if you've got a tank-based system. To me, I think the question is, it's a long-term development as equipment turns over, and that comes, of course, with the housing systems, because when it comes to low-emission animal houses, that tends to be the most expensive thing to do. They've committed to those as well, so you won't be operating a pig farm without scrubbing the air coming out the back of it if you're in Denmark or the Netherlands. But that would be that you would, if you're going to rebuild your building in due course, make sure when you rebuild, rebuild with the latest technology. They've gone to extreme lengths. Now, whether this is right or wrong, I don't know. I'm just reporting it, because interestingly, some of the farmers decided they didn't want to run the scrubbers on their buildings. In the game of cat and mouse, the government came in and installed smart meters on the animal houses, so they know they're actually being turned on. Is that good or bad? I don't know. It's certainly meaning that they're going to be more diligent in extremists of reducing emissions. Let's compare that. I think the first thing to realise is that you've got a chain, and I would work back myself from the farmer perspective of, this is manure, I want to use it well, start in the field, and I want to get the best out of it. So how can I get the best out of it? Is that meaning I'm going to buy myself some a kit or maybe I'm not a big enough farmer and I want to do some equipment sharing or even use contractors? Having done, made the best out of the muck I've got, I then want to say, I want the best quality muck I can get, which means that it's not diluted with a massive water and it's not lost half of its goodness to the air, so can I have it in a store? So for example, I have a friend, it's a very large farm they're running, and they invested firstly in a low emission manure spreader, a shallow injection system, and secondly in what they call slurry bags, massive pillows the size of this table into which your slurry is put, so it has zero emissions. They've noticed first that the manure coming out of that slurry bag is better quality than when it went in, because it's mobilised more inorganic nitrogen, and secondly they're getting it into the whole better. They've found out now that they've got a greener crop and they're saving several tens of thousands a year on their fertilizer bill as a result. So in the end I think this is actually pointing towards a world where we might look to training to farmers about how could you put this into your business plan that says, you know, you're going to invest in something, this is an investment that ultimately you would want to pay back time on, and that it could actually pay for itself in due course and give the confidence to know that they can do that. The bit I can't answer is a bit about ambition level. This is a bit like your question about how many deaths are acceptable from particulate matter shortening of life and air pollution. So that comes down to what level of ambition do you want and how far do you want to get? That has to be a policy question. Surely there's much that can be done in mobilising through incentive schemes through better education to take up these measures so that leading farmers are doing them and others see their friends doing things. I might do that too. Ultimately, if you really want to clean the air with a 50% level in a few years, I can't see any other way than you're going to do it by regulation, but that's a social discussion. Well, the final question I want to ask is, I mean, who should be responsible for developing and implementing a nitrogen strategy in Scotland and not for everybody to answer? Briefly, thank you. So as I mentioned, nitrogen's going up into air pollution is contributing to our greenhouse gas emissions through nitrogen oxide, contributing to water pollution. To me, I could imagine it being something that the Scottish Government convenes with lots of stakeholders in the SEPA, with academia, with farmers to say, what is the evidence? How can we do this together? I just was last week in a meeting convened by Narish Scotland, where many of the stakeholders were there, and they are very keen in seeing this in the future climate change revision that you're looking at. But I think it's clearly multi-actor. It needs everybody on board, but it needs somebody to hold the handle, and I guess that would be the Scottish Government. Does any of you want to add to that, or do you tend to agree with those comments? I see heads being lauded. Thank you very much for that. And the final set of questions from Angus MacDonald. Okay. Thanks, convener. I found that section fascinating coming from a famine background myself, but if we can move on to look briefly at the development planning issues and the need for new housing. We know that air quality isn't always, unfortunately, considered a priority when it comes to development planning and transport planning. So, do the panel members see any way of reconciling the need for new housing and related services with the rise in motorised travel? I'm not sure if I fully understand what you're asking. Okay. There's an issue with the development sections in various local authorities, perhaps not taking air quality as their priority. Is there any way of making sure that they do, and dealing with the issue that new housing will obviously attract increased motorised travel? For example, would the increased use of electric vehicles be the solution, or would that not go far enough? Certainly within Glasgow, it's a consideration that, as part of the planning process, when it comes in, we'll look at developments and, if necessary, require full assessments, carried out air quality assessment to support the submission through the planning process. We'll scrutinise that and see if it's likely to lead to any impact on air quality. If there is any negative impact, we're looking for mitigation measures to be put in place to try and reduce that as much as possible. Again, through CAF's planning and placemaking, there's a key component of that. I'm not a planning officer, but decisions are being taken at the moment to look at how we develop the city, the adequate provisions in for sustainable transport, transport planning, public transport provision and electric charging points, if and where necessary. Some of the developments that are taking place at the moment are being granted with no parking provision at all, because it's recognised that we don't want to encourage people to bring additional vehicles into the city centre. It's certainly, I think, further up the planning agenda now than it ever has been as a consideration in terms of air quality. Thought to this, but what are the solutions to providing charging points in a city like Glasgow that has so many tenement buildings? It's a challenge. It can be hubs. It can be localised hubs. Do we need as many petrol stations as we go forward? A lot of them have been taken out of the city centre area. That could be a way of doing it. They are currently looking at the I think it's called the ruggedised project within Glasgow, which is looking to tap into streetlights instead of putting in brand new electric charging points. The technology will lead the way in what can be available. As the market grows, we are seeing quite a significant growth in electric vehicles. That technology should make it available at a variety of new innovative ways of charging vehicles in built-up areas. It could be that we already have charging points within our multi-storey car parks. That could be increased. Charging points are put in shopping centres and supermarkets and so on. That could be an area where it's increased. Of course, as batteries technology improves and the mileage increases, you may not need to charge a vehicle every day. We will wait and see. It is certainly being considered. It is a challenge for Glasgow, but it is something that has been looked at at the moment. I was just going to echo what Vincent has said is experienced across the rest of Scotland, because it is represented across the whole way. The Scottish Government has given training for planners in air quality, which is helping to inform them to consider air quality more as an impactor. That also informs anyone who is contributing to a housing strategy within the local authorities. The raised agenda of air quality also informs the local development plans. As Vincent said, there are guides about where thresholds would be breached for housing size. If there was a major new development, it would trigger the thought of where are those impacts. Planners in my experience through the networks and the pollution groups are becoming aware that they can get agreements, either by better walkways, access to routes, monitoring before and after, not just within housing but also in commercial settings, where there are large-scale developments. Certainly in my experience so far, that is further up the agenda within development control and in housing developments. I hope that that will improve as we go on, as the housing demand is met. Should there be, for example, a condition in any planning application that is granted for houses, not flats, that an EV charger must be in every drive? It depends on the particular development that comes in and what the challenge is, where that is situated. It would not be a bad thing going forward, because it is a lot more expensive to put things in after the event than to put them in at the time when the building is being put in place. If there was a new development in the city centre, a significant new development, we would be looking for charging points within it. I do not know whether that is the case across Scotland in more rural and urban authorities, if it is even appropriate. David Duffie? Just to say, the other officer who helped to contribute for a rehist contribution works within Edinburgh City Council, and they have a strategy for delivering that and how the approach, where the target threshold is, for deciding whether EV points will go in. Rehist took the opportunity and we bought one and helped to put one in, just rehist badged because it was a good contribution, but it was through Edinburgh City Council's strategies of delivering that, so perhaps other local authorities can learn from their strategy. Okay, and with regard to retrofitting, how much would one of these cost? I'm not sure about retrofitting. I know that the one that rehist paid for the total cost was under 5,000, but it's very dependent on which type of unit you purchase. It's a fast charge of the area. Examples of planning applications that have been turned down as a result of impact on air quality or housing allocations that have been shifted within a local development plan within Glasgow or elsewhere? I'm not aware of any of the moment or recently that I've been refused. There is a change in how applications come in now. A lot of them are front-loaded that they have considered air quality and that they have designed it or looked to mitigate the impact of the development taking place. We sometimes go back with suggestions for conditions that go on planning consent, but I'm not aware of any see within the past 10 years that have necessarily been refused purely on air quality conditions. An example that I was involved in in Perth in 2011-12 was a domestic waste after-treatment incinerator that was planned for Perth City Centre. I was the expert witness on behalf of the council when the development was rejected by the Scottish Government's reporter on air quality grounds and odor, so that was a specific case, but it was an industrial facility. Gentlemen, thank you very much for your time this morning. It has been fascinating. If you have any further thoughts that come to mind, please share them by via follow-up emails, if that's okay. Perhaps on a personal note, those trees that aren't trees in Glasgow, I'd be quite interested in the location. The next time I visit the city and I promise to travel by public transport and not bring my polluting diesel, I could perhaps visit them. Thank you very much for your time. The third item on our agenda today, we'll see the committee consider the following negative instruments. The development of water resources, designated bodies, modifications, Scotland regulation 2017, SSI 2017, forward slash 347 and the water and sewerage services to dwellings collection of unmetered charges by local authorities, Scotland amendment order 2017, SSI 2017, forward slash 348. I refer members to the papers and I invite any comments. Richard Lyle. I notice that this relates to the water and sewerage services to dwellings collection of unmetered charges by local authority. It makes each local authority responsible for the collection of charges payable for water services, sewerage services provided by Scottish Water to dwellings in their council area, and it amends the 2014 order, extends it for a further two years from 2018 to 2020. I also note that the negotiations have concluded that at Cozzler's request during the two-year extension period, the Scottish Government will carry out a formal review of the collection options to inform the next order. This review should get under way later this year. I also hope that this review will show that this should stay with councils after a review. I note that the total amount deducted for the cost of collection in relation to services provided in each financial year was fixed at £18.25 million. By my calculations, on average, each council will get over £0.5 million for collection of water charges. I hope that this review will stay with councils as an additional added revenue for councils. Does anyone else have any comments to make on the instruments? No. Given that the committee does not wish to make any recommendations on the instruments, that is due to be noted. The fourth item on the agenda is for the committee to consider petition PE1636 by Michael Traill, which calls on the Scottish Parliament to introduce legislation requiring all single-use cups to be 100 per cent by a degradable. Details of the committee's previous work on the petition are set out in the papers, which suggest a range of possible options available to members. Can I invite any comments and suggestions on ways forward? I welcome the letter from the minister in the sugard minister, Roseanna Cunningham. I welcome the fact that Zero West Scotland are to look into this and that there is a new export panel to be appointed to look into this to see if something can be done to reduce the impact of the problem. I think that that is very much good progress on behalf of the Government. I am happy that that is happening. I think that we should keep the petition open and consider it from time to time, at least until such time as the Government has firmly taken up the baton, and we are starting to run with it. After that, once that has happened, the work of the petition and the petition's committee has been done. I would keep it open just for the time being to encourage the Government to remember it. Claudia Beamish Thank you, convener, just very briefly to support what my colleague John Scott is saying, and also to highlight that this is one of a range of ways in which we can be reducing waste, but also simplifying waste for the future. I think that this will help to focus minds on this is one of the options and an important one, but there are a whole range of other ways in which we can have simpler packaging, although there are things that we certainly still will be needing packaging for. I would support it being kept open to help focus minds. Are we content to take Mr Scott's suggestion as a way forward? We are indeed. At its next meeting on 21 November, the committee will consider subordinate legislation in stage 2 of the world animals and travelling circus of Scotland bill. As agreed earlier, we will now move into private. I ask that the public gallery be queered as the public part of the meeting is closed.