 Good morning and welcome to the 13th meeting of 2017 of the Environment, Climate Change, Land Reform Committee. We have apologies from Maurice Golden. Before we move to the first item on agenda, I want to remind everyone present to switch off mobile phones and any other electronic devices as they may affect the broadcasting system. Agenda item 1 is can I welcome Peter Chapman to the committee as a formal substitute for our deputy convener, Maurice Golden? Can I invite Peter Chapman to declare any interests he may have that are relevant to the work of the committee, Mr Chapman? Thank you, convener. I am a landowner and farmer in Aberdeenshire. We also have, in relation to this particular item today, four wind turbines that we own on the farm as well. That covers everything, I think, convener. Agenda item 2 is decision on taking business in private. That relates to items 3 and 4 on the agenda. Are we all agreed? We are indeed agreed. We moved to the second item on the committee's agenda this morning, which is to take evidence on the subject of air quality in Scotland. The committee has agreed to hold an evidence session with experts and stakeholders to consider the scale of the issue of air quality in Scotland and the robustness of Scottish plans to tackle that. The evidence session will be structured in two panels, the first focusing on the environmental and health impacts of air pollution, the second on the effectiveness of the policies and management strategies to tackle these. Based on those discussions, the committee will consider whether it wishes to pursue the issue further and, if so, which particular threads of the topic will be prioritised in the remit of any future inquiry. We are delighted to have been joined by two panels of witnesses this morning. We will be taking evidence in a round-table format to allow a fuller discussion of the issues. Members will be posing questions to prompt exploratory discussion. If you wish to contribute, please indicate this to me or the clerks. Importantly—and this is important—if you don't wish to respond, you don't have to respond to every question. Each session will last roughly an hour, so I would ask that both the questions and answers are as succinct as possible to allow us to cover as much ground as possible. The first panel is joined by Professor David Newby, Fintan Hurley, George Curley, Dr Colin Ramsey and Janice Milne. We will move directly to questions. If you just bear with me because I think that I am asking question number one. I ask the panel what are the main sources of air pollution in Scotland and how robust is the modelling and evidence to confirm this? If you wish to go first. Janice Milne. Thank you. Main sources of air pollution—we can start with industry, so we look at combustion from power plants and other industrial sources there. We have a number of combustion gases, NOX SO2. Transport is increasingly a contributor to air pollution, as we have seen. Again, NOX is a particular matter there. With respect to modelling industrial activities that SIPA regulates, so those tend to be the more complex sites. We require operators to monitor what is emitted from their stack. SIPA will do some audit monitoring of that. We also ask operators to do some modelling, which will back up the emissions from the stack. We are working on the transport side of things under the Clean Air for Scotland strategy on modelling. Computer models—we know that there can be differences, a number of quite high percentage of variations between computer models. That is one of the reasons that we are trying under the Clean Air for Scotland strategy to come up with one model that all local authorities can use, which would then reduce that uncertainty. With any computer model, there will be uncertainties. It is always advisable to then back that up with actual monitoring, but it is not possible to see an actual percentage with respect to how accurate the models are. If one accepts that that is a very good answer to that first question, can I ask the other witnesses to consider all these main sources, how readily can they be controlled and whether there are any new sources that are increasingly becoming a concern? For example, I read in the written evidence a suggestion that wood-burning stoves and commercial biomass boilers are causing concerns around CO2 emissions, so it can be explored at that angle. Colin Ramsey. My submission is a relatively recent phenomenon. That has been quite a marked growth in the use of wood-burning stoves. That was particularly noted in London, in fact, in evidence that at the distribution of particulate pollution, especially. We are beginning to become concerned about the contribution of that. Although we have smoke control zones from historical legislation, the Clean Air Act, that is a feature that people need to be aware of. The picture is changing. It is evolving over time and sometimes efforts to use more sustainable sources of energy, for example, sometimes have unforeseen consequences when people do not necessarily predict them. I think that there has been a bit of concern. There seems to have been an emphasis on switching from, I don't know if some people regard it as controversial, from things like gas boilers in schools to biomass boilers. Again, if you look at the emissions perspective in some of these, whether or not they are actually advantageous is perhaps a little bit more questionable. I think that there are some trends. I wouldn't want to exaggerate them in the relative terms to all the other contributions from transport, et cetera, but I think that we just have a dynamic in terms of the sources of pollutants and how they are affecting the overall balance. Is it something that we think we ought to be concerned about or that we know we ought to be concerned about? I think that we know we ought to be concerned about. Anything that is contributing more to air pollution, we ought to be concerned about. Is there some evidence there that suggests that this is actually an issue that we should be concerned about? Yes, exactly from London. The latest work in London has looked at the contribution of wood burning and so on, et cetera, to the particular pollution. What about the ability to control the main sources that we are absolutely sure of? How are we placed with that? For those activities that are specified in regulations, then CEPA has a responsibility to authorise. An operator has got to apply for a permit and as part of that the operator has got to demonstrate that they are using what we call best available techniques to reduce or minimise emissions and not only do we have a role in protecting and improving the environment but also health and wellbeing and sustainable economic growth. As far as those activities are regulated, we have an authorisation and the operator has got to comply with that. It is less easy with what we describe as non-regulated sources such as diffuse pollution, whether that comes from transport or other domestic premises. OK, thank you very much. Let's move on, Kate Forbes. Our written evidence from CEPA stated that all pollutants, with the exception of ammonia, had shown dramatic reductions over time. Why has ammonia not reduced at the same rate as other relevant pollutants and what action might be taken to address that? The main sources of ammonia emissions result from agricultural activities and therefore are less easy to control because they are turned to what we call diffuse pollution. Other than intensive agricultural installations, that includes intensive pig and poultry, which we regulate and we can set certain conditions on it. It is more difficult to set controls, as you are speaking about, as I say, manure, spreading manure, etc. That is why we have not seen emissions of ammonia reduced as in respect of other industrial activities, which are perhaps less easy to control with certain abatement techniques. It is something that requires an increased focus, but it does require the policy emphasis to be placed on that. It is maybe just a guess, but the primary pollutants that we get focused on are particulate nitrogen dioxide, ozone and so on. Ammonia has an effect by combining with those gases to make other particles. I am thinking that it is not directly in the line of sight as much as other pollutants because its role is secondary and indirect but still important. Anyone else? Kate? Our other written evidence made the point that the levels of air quality are constantly changing. What difficulties does this pose to monitoring and mitigation? How can we improve on that and make sure that we are constantly improving the quality of air? Perhaps, if I can start. We have a number of 95 monitoring networks around Scotland. Regular information is produced on an automatic basis available on the web, whereas the conditions obviously do impact. We see clear still days where pollution does not move so far. You will see in a cold day what we call an inversion layer where pollution gets trapped. That level will be higher then if it is a windy day. That is why you will see variations in what is picked up at monitoring stations. Whether does play quite a big role on that. Just a very quick question. Have we baselined those pollutants? We talked about agriculture playing a major role. Do you know whether the amount of ammonia produced through agriculture has increased or decreased? We are now seeing anaerobic digesters and different methods of cropping. If we are looking at an increase or a decrease in the pollutants caused by agriculture. I do not have that information to hand. I can provide that later on. The one thing that we need to be aware of is transboundary impacts. Air pollution does not sit neatly within one boundary. We always have to take into account that we are seeing pollution effects from other European countries, for example. It is quite difficult to get a baseline. With respect to background levels, that is why we have some monitoring sites. For example, at Strasvig, up in the highlands, because that is a rural site. It allows us to understand what background levels may be in a rural area and compare that with what is happening in other areas. Do you have any concerns about waste to heat plants that are being currently at planning stage? No, I am not aware of anything. Each planning application would be dealt with on its own merits. SEPA is a statutory consultee, together with other organisations. I am not aware of anything now. Kate? The last question is about the general picture. What are the key targets in your view for air quality and are they adequate? The targets are set within the air quality strategy for the UK, Scotland, England and Ireland. They are set as objectives to protect human health. That is what we are aiming for. I consider that they are the adequate targets. With particular air pollution, the strong understanding now is that there is not such a thing as a safe level. No matter how good the target is, there are likely to be health effects to be found. It is important to remember that, particularly for particles. I think that it is the best working assumption for NO2. For ozone, it may not be the case. In Scotland, Scotland has adopted more ambitious targets for particles than the UK or the EU would require. I am really glad of that. Even if they are met, it does not mean that the problem is entirely solved. The biggest problem with air pollution is that you cannot avoid exposure. Everybody is exposed. Even if targets are met, there will still be health impacts. I think that there will still be even a substantial public health issue. Do you accept that sometimes the science lets us down? I think that, for example, a few years ago, we were all encouraged to buy diesel vehicles because we were told that they were better for the environment. Then the World Health Organization reveals that the testing of the filters on modern diesels was not properly conducted. Those are spitting out worse particulates in the atmosphere, cancer-causing particulates, than we had ever believed was a situation in an urban setting. Thank you. I think that there are two aspects to that. The first is the huge importance of not developing policy in isolation. The Scottish policy is set up to not develop air quality policy in isolation, to look at climate change effects, to look at place making effects and so on. I am really glad of that. The push towards diesels came, in the first instance, for climate change issues before people realised that the local air pollution problems that they caused were going to be so big. The failure to do the emission testing correctly isn't necessarily just a failure of science. I think we all know that there is maybe more to it than that. Let's move on. Angus MacDonald. Good morning to the panel. I would like to explore in some detail the air quality management areas. We know from SEPA's submission that, despite improvements in recent decades, there are still some urban hotspot areas where air quality is of concern. We know that there are currently 38 AQMAs in Scotland with orbit 2 declared for transport emissions. I know from representing my Falkirk East constituency that one or the other of the two AQMAs takes in the Green, Smith, Petrochemical complex and the surrounding area, and it has been declared following our dioxide breaches and it has been in place for some time, perhaps too long. AQMAs seem to help to concentrate the minds of some of the firms, but any of us, for example, in Green, Smith, have invested significantly with £30 million on a sulphur recovery tailgas unit, which has resulted in significant reductions in SO2 breaches. That is one of the non-transport emission AQMAs accounted for. I wonder if perhaps SEPA could tell the committee where the other one is and where the worst of the urban hotspots was in the other 36 AQMAs are. Janice Milne. The second that you refer to is a site in West Lothian, Newhouse, if I'm correct. The reason for the exceedances in that air quality management area is due to domestic use. There are also non-transport emissions. Can you clarify domestic use? Sorry, so stoves. There must be an awful lot of stoves in West Lothian. That's the data that's being gathered, but I can't, as I say, but that's the information that I can provide later on. It's non-transport and it relates to, as I said, domestic use. I will, yes. I will, yes. I will, yes. Can you give us an indication of the worst of the other urban hotspots, the other 36 AQMAs? I don't have the worst hotspot other than knowing that and identifying the major areas. So I wouldn't today want to say what is the worst hotspot today. We know that areas such as Oak Street and Glasgow, particularly areas in Edinburgh, but I don't have, I'll submit that information after. Mark Ruskell. Thanks, convener. Go back to AQMAs that are largely designated because of transport emissions. What actions do you actually take in those areas that are highly polluted? What actions is CEPA actually involved in? The responsibility is for the local authority to review and assess the air quality within their area against the objectives that are set in the air quality strategy. Where those levels do not meet the objectives, local authorities have got to submit an action plan which details the actions that they will take to meet those objectives. We review and assess those plans. So then, as I say, local authority has got to put an action plan together and this is one of the challenges with respect to how do you improve. So we see that it's largely, as we've spoken about, majority of the air quality management areas are down to transport emissions. So it's for the local authority to put plans in place and that's one of the challenges is actually knowing what action to take which will give you the reduction in emissions. Sorry? So if you're looking at a plan and you judge that the actions within that are not going to be effective to reduce nitrous oxides in particular, do you step in and tell the local authority that it needs to change the plan or what? Yes, we would do if we didn't think it was adequate. That's probably one of the reasons why we've got the clean air for Scotland because we know that it is so difficult to address it. So why we would have the powers to step in and say it's not effective, we wouldn't do that in isolation and knowing all the facts because, as I said, we've now got the strategy, the commitment, for at least one low emission zone by 2018, but it is a very difficult problem to address which requires a different... How often have you stepped in? To say a plan isn't adequate, I don't have that information at the moment. I can come back to you on that. It doesn't stick out that you have actually intervened in any of these plans? I think we probably have, but I'm sorry, I don't have the information to my hand. We have at least two people that deal specifically with local equality on their local equality management plans. So where they have been inadequate, we have gone back and said they're not adequate, but I don't have the numbers in front of me to say to you. Certainly we are tightening up with respect to getting local authorities to submit their action plans on time. They weren't always getting submitted timeously to us. We were able to use section 85 powers, we haven't had to use that because local authorities and the submission of plans have been far better with respect to performance that submitting these plans. Yes, the challenges, the effectiveness and actually seeing the results through. I think it would be useful, convenient to have a couple of case studies on that, where CEPA has and where it hasn't intervened and the reasons for that. Is the regulatory system actually working here or not? Angus MacDonald. I've just fallen on from Mark Ruskell's point. Can I ask Janice Milne if she believes that liaison between local authorities and CEPA is working on specifically air quality? Yes, I would. We've got good links. We've worked with local authorities over many years. The local equality management system has been in place since 1996. We've worked well with local authorities and we're involved with the Scottish Pollution Coordinating Committee, which is a forum at local authority level. CEPA is represented there and also in other groups with local authorities. When you say that local authorities have adequate powers to deal with air pollution and the purchase of AQMA areas. I think that the challenge is actually being able to implement action plans, which require changes in public behaviour. It's not a simple thing to enact, otherwise all the local authorities would have made these improvements many years ago. It requires a concerted effort, which is why CAF's Clean Air for Scotland strategy was developed bringing climate change transport communications legislation together. We've discussed in previous actions being taken under climate change, which have impacted on air quality. One of the aims here is to make sure that decisions that we make for climate change purposes also have multiple benefits and improvements to air quality. Just for the record and for the committee's information, can you tell us what area of land does an AQMA cover and do you feel that an AQMA designation is sufficient to tackle air pollution? The area of an air quality management area varies in size. It can be one street or it can be wider than that. It just very much depends on what the monitors are showing and the evidence on that. It can very much vary in size but generally based around the roads. For example, the non-transport AQMA that you mentioned in West Llorian is that just one street? I will get back with that information on that. Professor Colin Ramsay put in his submission that Scotland has some of the strictest health-based air quality targets of any comparable country that are relative really well, but there is still room for further reduction in transport-related air pollution, especially in heavily trafficked urban areas. How would he suggest that we reduce this air pollution? What actions should we take? That is what the whole Cleeter Air for Scotland strategy is all about. It is about trying to set out a set of measures to try to tackle transport-related air pollution, which is one of the potentially most preventable sources of air pollution that we have because it is generated by our activities. I say our because I think we all contribute to it in one way or another. The CAF strategy has set out an approach to it that recognises the need to tackle the fundamentals of transport-generated air pollution, and that is the amount of traffic on the roads and the mixture of traffic and the kinds of combustion engines that are being used. The attempts to define the monitoring and modelling strategy are an attempt to try to create a level playing field across the whole country so that people are not being disadvantaged depending on where they are in terms of the sort of actions that may be taken. The most important thing about CAFs as well is that it recognises that it is not just tackling pollution at source, but it is about creating an environment where there are opportunities to change the whole balance of transport behaviours amongst people and to make it easier for people to choose healthier options, i.e. cycling and walking and active travel, as opposed to all those resorting to a private car, for example. Obviously, changing to public transport is a way of reducing the total amount of air pollution because if you get people out of their cars, you are reducing the amount of emissions associated with that. I think that there is a whole range of options which are the attempt in CAFs to set out what those options are, but they all have to move along in parallel rather than necessarily focusing on one particular area to the exclusion of others. I think that it is very challenging for local authorities to try to effect changes at local level, which can make a big impact. I think that they are likely to be incremental impacts, relatively small impacts, quite difficult to measure impacts in many ways, but I think that it will take time to do it, but I think that it is an incremental process. Anyone else want to come in on that? Peter Chapman. Can I just ask him? We have heard how the diesel engine has been proven to be much more polluting than we originally thought, but one of the things that is happening with, certainly in lorries and tractors and farms and bigger diesel engines is the ad-blue technology, which cleans up the exhaust systems. Surely that is one way that we can help to clean up the diesel engine. I wouldn't claim to be an expert on the technicalities of engine emissions on the control systems. All I would say is in relation to that, I think that yes, there are mechanisms to do that, retrospectively, to fit even relatively dirty engines with mechanisms to try to reduce the amount of pollutants. I think that there has been a steady progression amongst the car industry in terms of developing engines to try to do that. Catalytic converters and particulate filters and all the rest of it are ways that have been doing that. That question is particularly important in relation to, for example, buses, because I think that one of the big, big issues and I think that David Begg, who used to be in Edinburgh, as a councillor, is now recognised as an expert in transport pollution, has written recently about the role of buses in terms of this whole picture and the fact that a lot of benefit could be achieved by retrofitting buses with the technology to clean them up as opposed to having to everybody buying new buses, which would be colossally expensive and probably couldn't be affordable by many organisations. You're right, I think that there is a role for a technological solution to it, but that's, in effect, a relatively short-term solution. I think that we're trying to look at the longer-term solutions. Okay. Fenton Harley. Fenton, just support and emphasise what Colin had said, the importance of policies that make it easier for people to avoid, for example, using cars. So public transport is one of them. Colin's submission also quotes from Cleaner Air for Scotland on what's called modal shift and he mentioned it, moving towards making it easier for people to walk and cycle. I think that your next panel is probably more expertise on this, certainly than I have, but a commitment to spend a proportion of the budget on transport infrastructure on making it simpler for people to walk and cycle would help push that and help move it from, I call it, a nice objective to something much harder. Llywydd Stiol. Thank you for making that an observation rather than a question. I think that Peter Chapman is right to say that diesels are not all the same. I think that the Euro 6 model, for example, are much less polluting. I think that the wider political argument is that it would also help if car manufacturers were honest and upfront about their testing vehicles and not in the situation that you've had with Volkswagen and others who, frankly, have been fraudulently involved in the system, which has not been adequately checking vehicles. I think that the political solution, certainly from my point of view, is to have bus regulation, which involves local authorities and much more control over our buses. In one sense, it's almost madness having, in city centres, polluting diesel vehicles when we should be having the fleets of electric vehicles. Certainly in my own patch and in the islands and islands, I know that state roads have got a fleet of electric buses, which obviously are not polluting. I think that there's a way forward politically by understanding to the academics that this is not really a policy question for them, it's more what can we do in this Parliament to ensure that pollution levels fall? The bus regulation is certainly the way forward. Richard Lyle. Fintan Hurley touched on my next question in regard to the Scottish Government's Cleaner Air for Scotland strategy, national modelling framework and national low emission framework. Does the panel have a view on the process for putting the NMF in place and how it supports decision making around place making and transport planning in relation to air quality management? Fintan Hurley. I'll be honest, people in your next panel will have a much more informed view of that than I have. Very honest, thank you. Richard Lyle, do you have any other questions? Last question can be none of that. What would, as anyone have a view, what the timescale for delivery of NLEF, whether the budget is adequate and how the evidence-gathering will inform decision making? That's more appropriate for the second session. Thank you, panel. I may come back with those questions later. Let's move us on, Emma Harper. I'm interested in health and the impacts of pollution and the environment in health. Written evidence that we received from Health Protection Scotland noted that the average levels of this harmful particulate matter, so PM size 2.5 or less, is lower in Scotland than the rest of the UK. The deaths that are attributed to air quality or poor air quality is almost 3,000 a year, but it's hard to quantify or directly relate those deaths associated with air pollution. How can we accurately estimate the human impact of air pollution and how might the understanding of air quality and its multiple influences be improved? David Newby. That's a question. Obviously, when people look at population risk and attributable risk, what they tend to do is look at the proportionality and make a calculation. It's a bit like if the average blood pressure of Scotland went up by 2 millimetres of mercury. The number of strokes we'd have would go up. When you're looking at the quantification of the risk, it is applied to a population, and that's where those numbers come from, are from the pollution levels, the background levels that we have. What Fintan said earlier in terms of obviously there's no absolute level that is safe, and if you look within Scotland the levels that we have and you make some extrapolations, then that's where the calculation comes from. So it's a ballpark figure. It tells you roughly what people are dying from. It's not actually cancer that was mentioned earlier on. It's usually more of my domain of heart attacks where people die. Cardiovascular disease is the main killer associated with air pollution. I forgot to mention my interest in the cross-party group co-convener for the lung health group. My background is a nurse also. I think that the deaths people associate air pollution deaths with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease exacerbation, but it is really interesting to hear about the cardiac deaths associated because the particulate matter that gets into the bloodstream, so it's not just the lungs, so I'd be interested to hear a wee bit more about just defining that. That is the air pollution cause. Yes, of course. In fact, the research that I got involved in over the last 10 years, funded by the BHF, was actually working with people with lung disease. So I went to colleagues that worked to respiratory physicians who were treating people with COPD. People with COPD were dying from air pollution events, but actually from heart attacks rather than they do have clearly exacerbations of their disease, but the actual mortality was attributed mostly to cardiovascular events, so heart attacks. So the associations that we have seen have been, if you look at people who come in with heart attacks, you'll find that they're three times more likely to spend the last few hours in busy traffic than not when they have a heart attack. There is an association with triggering of heart attacks, and there's an association with long-term exposures making more likely to have things like heart attacks and strokes. Obviously, I'm talking about heart attacks because that's my field, but the same has also been reported in respiratory disease as well. It was suggested in the written submissions that there's a suggestion through research that there are possible links between air pollution and obesity. Is this simply because breathing issues can lead to a lack of activity being undertaken? Is there something more direct there? Yeah, it's difficult to demonstrate causality there, so if it's more polluted, you don't go out as much and maybe sedentary lifestyle, etc. So it's a little difficult, but there has been some, believe it or not, animal models that have suggested that the risk of diabetes, what we call the metabolic syndrome, that's a collection of obesity, diabetic tendencies, higher blood pressure and so forth, is much higher if you expose animals to high levels of air pollution. So there does seem to be on one level some causal association. And that has also been implicated as why potentially people are more likely to have heart attacks. Our own work has looked at how the blood vessels respond following controlled exposures to diesel exhaust, including tractors, but also other engines. And certainly the effects of inhaling air pollution and particularly diluted down diesel exhaust to levels that you'd find on the Princess Street on a still day do cause problems with increasing blood clotting, do cause problems of the blood vessels becoming more tight and constricted, and also in patients with heart disease we do see some worrying signs of increased stress on the heart when they're exposed to these diluted diesel particles. Okay, thanks for ffintan, do you want to come in here? Yes, please, can I make a couple of remarks on two things, one on the estimate of numbers of deaths that David has been talking about, that air pollution causes. So on the estimate of number of attributable deaths I think we need to separate two things. One is what is the size of the public health problem in Scotland caused by air pollution, getting people to die earlier, and secondly how many individuals are affected. And the reason it's important to separate these is that air pollution is one cause among many. So for an individual you can't, it's hard to say this person was killed by air pollution because there's so many other things that will have contributed to them dying earlier. I chaired the group from the Committee on Medical Effects of Air Pollutants, the London-based committee that came up with the number of 29,000 estimated equivalent to UK-wide with the corresponding number in Scotland. And we made that distinction. The way I think of it is if air pollution shortens my life a little in years and years and years and years it's really hard to say air pollution has killed any one of us. But if you add all of those together, the bit that my life has shortened in years and years and years, that's equivalent to killing more than 2,000 people a year in Scotland. And when I say that, it's as if we could take the same amount of loss of life and attribute it to a small number of people who were killed by air pollution only and nothing else. You get a number of about 2,000. So I think that that number is, I mean there are uncertainties around the estimation, but I think it's a solid idea and it's good for comparing with other things like road traffic accidents and so on where you can be more sure about what's causal. In the UK study, we came to an estimate of 29,000 deaths attributed to fine particles UK wide. And we said, look, it's a bit of a guess how many individuals it could be 200,000. So, you know, whose lives were shortened a year, which is like a third of all deaths. So in Scotland if you took the same ratio it might be 15,000 people a year whose lives are shortened by air pollution. I don't just mean living people who've died that air pollution made some contribution to them dying earlier. But 2,000 is a better figure for comparing with other things because of the fact that air pollution only operates to some extent with everything else. Did you come up with a figure on an estimate of the cost to the NHS annually? No, we didn't. Almost certainly other people have. Okay, okay. I won't add anything. David Stewart, a brief supplementary. I was reading this morning about an academic work from University of York from Knighton Howley who said that air pollution is equivalent to a life changing event such as bereavement and the effect it has on future health. Could you relate to that point? I'm not familiar with it and it isn't how I immediately think of it. I think that I'd stay agnostic on that. Ramsey, however, doesn't want to stay agnostic on it. I might mention that one in my written submission. It's only one study. I think that you always have to be very wary about finding it in one study. If you set it in the context of other studies that have looked at similar things, I think that the evidence base in relation to health and wellbeing is poor in comparison to the very good evidence base that is on the physical effects of air pollution. It's a guideline-gramming story and it had a curious way of comparing it to a major life event like bereavement. I think that if you drill down into it, the publication raises more questions than it answers in my view. Thanks, Fintan Howley. We did review for Health Protection Scotland and SEPA the evidence on health and wellbeing in relation to air pollution policies. If you think not so much of air pollution but of air pollution policies like modal shift, like active transport, I think that there is much more substantial evidence of benefits from policies that reduce air pollution than there is from the reduction of pollutants themselves. Thank you. Alex Bonlant. We can move on to data or more specifically the gaps in the data. Health Protection Scotland notes that relatively little is known about how much pollution individual people are exposed to in their everyday lives. Can I just start by asking very briefly Dr Ramsey to maybe talk about the quantum of that gap and how significant it is, and then to the wider panel, perhaps starting with Professor Newby, about how research might evolve to consider individual exposure and how we might go about developing a suitable approach for that. Firstly, very briefly, Dr Ramsey, about the gap itself and then the rest of the panel on how we might plug that gap. Thank you. Thanks for that. The point that I made was that our understanding of pollution, the distribution of pollution, is very much based on the concept that we have at the moment which is largely fixed-based monitoring sites, and that is only relevant to the immediate locality of that monitoring site. It can be modelled and there are very sophisticated statistical models which are used routinely, and that's one of the strategies in the CAFs is about developing a new modelling framework to allow you to estimate what the pollution is at any given point in a neighbourhood area, for example, or at a school or whatever. But these are only modelled estimates and some of them are pretty good models. I mean I'm not a statistician but I think they are robust. Although I'm saying we don't have individualised measures of pollution, we can model it to a significant degree, but I think the point is that I think people's experience of air pollution is radically different depending on their kind of everyday life cycle really, and we don't necessarily have a terrible good handle on what that degree of variation is. We come up with kind of global estimates of what we think people are exposed to, but then we come up with estimates of what that means in terms of health impacts, but they are very much estimates. As has been said before, it's very difficult to pin down precisely for you or I what the exact effect on us as an individual is because of all the other factors which affect our health anyway. So I think there is interest, for example, in people developing personalised monitors. And there have been some studies done in Edinburgh relatively recently looking at putting individual monitors on and people and letting them walk around in their everyday lives and then measuring the variations in that, but it's quite a labour intensive way of doing it. There are apps on the market where you can transform your mobile phone into a monitoring device. There are question marks about the accuracy of these and how reliable they are. I think there's potential for improving the gaps in terms of understanding, but I think it depends really what the purpose of doing that is to an extent. We could spend an awful lot of money trying to improve the understanding of individual experience, but we know that air pollution is bad for people. How much more do we really need to know about the effect of individuals before we have enough evidence to say that we need to do something about it in a proportionate way? So I'll certainly pose that question back. Sorry, for the record, just to be clear, according to the Scottish Air Quality Database annual report, nitrogen oxide levels across the country away from road sides are generally going downwards. Outside identified hotspots, can you quantify the scale of the issue we have? What I'm getting at is the increasing problem in urban settings far exceeding the decreasing situation away from road sides. Again, it might be more appropriate for us to come into the details of the results of the monitoring, but I think that the issue of the nitrogen dioxide is very much one related to hotspots, according to my understanding of it, not to the generality of the effects on the general population. Obviously, people move in and out of hotspots and, therefore, they're exposed to higher levels periodically, but, for example, lots of focus has been put on the Hope Street monitor, for example. To experience the level of pollution that you get in that monitor, you would have to literally stand by that roadside, kerbside for 24 hours a day for your life. Obviously, people don't get that. They get a variation on that. We have to try and bear in mind that we do have hotspot problems and they need to be tackled, but that doesn't necessarily reflect the generality of what people are being exposed to. Mark Ruskell and NNMR. I'm just thinking about how robust the model actually is at the moment for monitoring, because we will get, for example, hotspots outside of schools, out-school drop-off and pickup times with engines running, potentially quite vulnerable children affected by that as well. Is there not a case to have a much more widespread network of monitors and to increase the granularity, if you like, of the data that we're getting back? Colin Ramsey. Again, I think there have been some studies looking at, for example, putting monitors. Some local authorities have done this. They've put monitors at schools and, in fact, they have removed them because they have found that, in fact, they weren't able to demonstrate really marked increases. Obviously, the school run is a short period of time when the pollution levels will rise, the children then go into school and that then dissipates. What's more concerning to me, actually, is necessarily the location of schools next to busy roads. I've observed just anecdotally in the schools rebuilding programme, for example, where it appears to be a tendency to move new premises closer to main roads than, actually, the former schools were. I think that's an interesting aspect about how to integrate planning policy with air pollution policy, and I think that we're not necessarily paying as much attention to these aspects as we could. Emma. Just a quick question. If we're having nitrogen dioxide monitors around hotspots or busy areas, maybe it would be an idea to have monitors on lollipop persons because they are in the hotspot areas, in the AM and the PM, but then they go home so that we would be able to monitor their levels of nitrogen dioxide inhalation. Would that be something to consider? I remember there was a study done in Aberdeen on traffic wardens. It's more than 10 years ago. I can try and look it out and send you a link to it if you wish. It's just one of the things that's being brought up at the cross-party group about how do we look at best ways to monitor. There was a study done at the University of Leicester where a 14-year-old boy was given a backpack so he wandered around school, home, bus and from his analysis it basically affected behaviour change so the kids stopped hanging out at the bus stop and they moved to the swimming pool because less emissions were registered at the swimming pool. I seem to remember from evidence we took previously with SIPA that there's only a very limited number of these portable monitors available. Is that the case? If this relates to monitors that we make available to schools, yes. We have at the moment 10 which we're able to allocate to schools generally the way that they're used and the children use them so we will break because of that. We're running about six or seven available at any point in time. It is a very good way of educating children with respect to traffic idling there so yes you're at your level score up so there is something about behaviour change and we're aiming to increase those from 10 up to 20 so we're currently investigating funding options on that. We don't want to do more communication with respect to raising expectations until we have these in place. Will you talk about behaviour change? Do you mean parents not driving their kids to school? Yes. Can I just add Claudia Beamish in here because I know that Claudia is wanting to develop the theme with young people. Are there any further comments from the panel on how exposure to air pollution particularly in early life and what approaches are likely to yield the most benefit? We've touched on this is me trying to use my new surface and it's gone off, sorry. We've touched on directly tackling traffic congestion particularly from diesel engines and Peter Chapman's highlighted about the possibilities there of retrofitting. Also there have been some suggestions just in policy terms about advising families to avoid busy streets at particular times but this seems a bit unrealistic and perhaps draconian especially when you think of the school run. Either through are there things particularly for people in younger in younger life that the panel would like to highlight at this stage? Fenton, Holly. Can I say again I support what Colin has said earlier that the real most important thing is to bring down air pollution for everybody rather than to develop strategies of dodging around the air pollution that is there at the moment. I think David might have something to say for people who are particularly vulnerable not just young people but people with pre-existing illness. It's not really what I know and I don't think so much about myself but I know that there are ways of advising people to avoid various kinds of pollution hotspots. Just a few comments really just to jump back a little bit I was asked to comment on personal monitoring and I think we've covered most of that ground we have done personal monitoring but that's to track with physiological effects and of course that's very helpful but on a personal policy level I'm not sure how helpful that is unless you've got a particular issue with a certain pollutant. I think one of the things that you also don't capture in that is exposure so you might be polluted but if you're jogging through that pollution your exposure will be three or four times higher because you're jogging and you're breathing faster so even if the concentration doesn't change your exposure goes up. That touches on a little bit of what I'm saying about vulnerable groups so we have done some work whilst it's not quite socially acceptable in this country to wear a face mask we have done that in China we have done some interventions in patients who have heart disease and certainly we've seen some beneficial effects of wearing a face mask to reduce personal exposures to reduce their blood pressure and also the stress that their heart's under so a simple face mask is just for one day when walking around town can make a difference but that of course was in the context of Beijing where your pollution levels are many fold higher than we see in Scotland. I think the current advice for patients with heart disease for example in the UK would be something around we encourage exercise we encourage active lifestyle but on a polluted day perhaps that's not the day to do your jog or to go cycling through the city centre choose your days for exercise wisely and that's the sort of level that we're at at this present moment in time one final thing just to comment on the schools side of things I just want to reinforce that point the proximity to the road is probably the most important intervention that you want to think about in terms of town and country planning a lot of evidence that the closer you live to the road the more heart disease you have and yes children start to develop heart disease albeit very and mildly but when you're in your teens that's the first time you start to develop the thickening of your arteries so this is important Fenton, how about that? I think it's worth remembering that the damage that air pollution does starts really early it starts for the unborn child during pregnancy so there is a literature increasing research evidence which I think is now solid but I'm not really up to date with it that other things being equal women who live in higher polluted areas have a greater risk of prematurity and of lower birth weight babies for the same age of for the same number of weeks at birth so it starts really early and again I can send a link to you if you like or send you a copy of a recent research report but there's really quite solid evidence now that if you're, say, cycling in the kind of pollution that we have here you, as David explains you increase your exposure because of your breathing you increase your risk of traffic accidents but you have gains from physical activity and the gains from physical activity massively outweigh the disadvantages of the other two except in some perhaps Beijing again but like for Scotland I think it's no contest Okay, thanks we've covered that quite well Peter Chapman wants to move on to something completely different Yeah, I'd like to explore the impact of pollution on the wider environment and we know that pollutants can travel long distances in the atmosphere before being deposited on our countryside and the deposition of acid and nitrogen-rich pollutants can damage habitats by acidifying the soil and by increasing the availability of nitrogen and that can affect the type and number of species present so the question is what are the impacts on ecosystems of nutrient enrichment and acidification in which ecosystems are particularly vulnerable to that? Janice Milne I think it's probably best if I come back with details on the specific ecosystems like in the mosses for example are impacted by acidification we know that forestry is something that's also been damaged by acidification the recovery relates to the impact of the soil and its ability to actually neutralise that so in south west Scotland we know for example it's taken longer to recover from the impact of acid rain than other areas in Scotland so the composition of the soil isn't as adequate to actually neutralise that so while emissions of certainly SO2 and acid rain associated with SO2 we are seeing some reductions the ability in different areas of Scotland it varies with recovery but on the actual specifics ecosystems and I'll come back to you on that How might air pollution be tackled by intensive agriculture and do you think that environmental impacts tend to be considered of lesser importance than health impacts? The issues from intensive agriculture very much relate to particular matter certainly if we're looking at intensive poultry and it's one of the areas where we've put quite a bit of emphasis to actually evaluate so we ask operators to model what we want to do is actually some monitoring to evaluate whether or not these models are accurate so particular matter is an issue we tend to focus particular matter because of its health issues and we use that level and that then would allow us to demonstrate the impact in the environment by using that level on health impact so that's our focus at the moment and is still probably fair to say quite a bit of work to be done where the issues are and the concern from intensive agriculture is where you have sensitive receptors so what I mean when I say that is sites of special scientific interest where conservation agencies say that these are susceptible to critical loading so we've referred to ammonia before what are they susceptible to and getting an understanding from the conservation agencies of the ecosystems related to there so we have controls over intensive agriculture we need to do some more monitoring to evaluate how accurate the model is Can I ask how much air pollution in Scotland is estimated to come from the rest of the UK and from Europe is there any figures for that any ideas about how the pollutants move in the air I don't have the figure off the top of my head I'm sorry I can If there is any information that would be useful to have it to hand Finlay Carson, briefly That's quite an important issue we need to find out what we can actually do you touched on acid rain in Dumfries and Galloway and you're not very aware of but it wouldn't have mattered what actions we took to reduce or improve air quality in Dumfries and Galloway we would still have the effects so I think it's vitally important to know just how much control we do have over our air quality in Scotland and what effect we can have on that That's also true that air pollution in Scotland could be travelling elsewhere so we still have that responsibility to tackle it That's one of the reasons why we have the national emissions ceiling directive which was put in place to implement the Gothenburg protocol so it relates to emissions ceilings, mass amounts ammonia, VOCs, NOCs, SO2 in particular matter setting actual quantities UK has a limit which we measure through our national emissions sorry our emissions inventory we are blower targets on other European countries and others meeting the Gothenburg protocol as well but that sets the limit on mass emissions Okay, thank you. Let's move on to Mark Ruskell Yeah, thanks We've already touched on Cleaner F for Scotland Scottish Government strategy What do you see as the strengths and weaknesses of this strategy? One of the strengths is that for the first time it brings together a number of different policy areas so it brings together transport climate change, communication legislation health It's the first time that these policy areas have been brought together and that was the prime the first purpose of the strategy was it was cross-governmental and it was also the fact that it wasn't just the environment minister that co-edited the transport minister so for the first time there was this recognition that this is not something that can be sorted in isolation we need to get our land use planning sorted out we need to make sure that when we are coming up with decisions on climate change it is not having an adverse effect on air quality we need to get the health messaging right we need to because the communication is so key air pollution is not something that you can see now it's not dirty smoke that's coming out of chimney what is the best way to sell the multiple benefits of good air quality so it's changing the modal shift getting people out of cars before getting them active travel so that's the one of the key strengths was actually the first time probably ever you had that cross policy group it still is at early stage we know that there's still a lot of challenges to make sure that what we do moving forward gives us the biggest benefits where are its weaknesses you could say that challenging targets and possibly knowing where the resource is going to come from to enable local authorities to fulfil the roles it's a challenge it's the challenging time skills we have any other views on that at all from the panel I support what Genesis just said and it's in the background papers too about the importance of integrated policy making and I think that's just hugely important I'm glad that there's a focus on exposure reduction for everybody rather than just hotspots and a focus and again I think the next panel will have a better informed view than I would have on on implementation Richard Lyle is a brief supplement can I ask George Curly from NHS Lothian do you monitor what when people arrive at A&E at the reasons why the air pollution and if you do do you pass on the information to seeper to show that other hotspots are not being monitored I'm not aware that we connect or collect any of that type of so NHS Scotland does not monitor anything in regard to air quality I'm not aware I think it's more a question from David certainly from my point of view I'm interested and Colin Ramsey briefly and we'll go back to Mark Ruskell I think the question is trying to understand are we in some way trying to tribute what people turn up at A&E to what their circumstances have been prior to that it's simply not practically possible to do that from a NHS perspective because you're at the receiving end of it that relies on an understanding of the environment in which that individual has come from let's go back to the problem of the NHS fix of sick people as opposed to trying to tackle the preventative element of it Emma Harper Deffra have a UK Air Information resource it's a pollution forecast provided by the Met Office so basically it's a pollution map are we not able to track high levels of air pollution and correlate that with the number of unplanned hospital admissions so we have £1 billion a year spent in Scotland on lung health and I know that's not all spent on lung exacerbations but couldn't we use the pollution map to correlate hospital admissions there's a huge amount of studies worldwide including some in Scotland I can look out some certainly in Edinburgh I think probably in Glasgow on what we call a set of short term air pollution in other words the day to day levels and how they impact on death rates in the immediately following days and on hospital admissions and on small changes to the functioning of the heart and the lungs and so on there's a massive amount of evidence about that it isn't what's the main driver of the public health problem the main driver is long term exposure to everybody but it is an important piece and very important supporting evidence and I guess say between David and myself or between David Collin and myself we can give you some links to how that has been studied in Scotland and elsewhere although Colin Ramsey in brief we you wanted to come by that ok that's fine Mark Ruskell do you want to develop this can I just comment that once you can do associations it's not necessarily causal but one of the things that Scotland did do very well was smoking in public places now no that's not what we're talking about today but it is a form of air pollution second hand air-spoken of course the legislation did see that it reduced the rates of myocard infarction so heart attacks across Scotland by about 17% following the introduction of that legislation and I think it's a nice example where policy decisions can actually have a very positive effect on health and if we dream that we can get a less polluted we can get diesel engine emissions down which is what most of the Scottish population are exposed to they're mostly urbanised I'm not saying that we shouldn't worry about the rural aspects of what we're talking about today but if you're looking at population level that's where people live and work they drive to work they take their kids to work and if we dream that we can get a less polluted that's the real winner and we have shown before we can make a difference and I think where policy decisions can be really impactful Very interesting Mark, do you want to continue? Just leading on from that and coming back to the Cleaner Air for Scotland strategy you mentioned earlier on about the lack of resourcing incentives there for people to take Is this about investment in those policy choices in our infrastructure or is it about something else? Referred to resourcing I've just mentioned resourcing overall is probably a challenge rather than one specific area I think I would refer to the second session for local authorities to comment on funding aspects there Are you happy with that, Mark? We'll go back to it Let's move on to David Stewart London has led the way with the introduction of low-emission zones and as the panel we know they're also planning ultra-low-emission zones in 2019 What evidence is there out there in the UK or beyond that the introduction of low-emission zones are effective in reducing local pollution levels? If you want to pick up on that I'm looking at Fintan Hurley I feel like I ought to know but it's not something that I'm really up to date with so I'm sorry there would be two things one is what is there a demonstrated impact on air pollution concentrations and then the secondary question is is there a demonstrable impact on health as a consequence of that and I'll be honest it's not an area that I've read into Can I guess the answer to this question as well Is there any evidence around the cost-benefit ratio I picked up a figure from London that I think the scheme cost around £100 million to set up Members will know and panel members will know that the scheme in London is done through camera system that recognises number plates there's no charge if it's an old vehicle which is more polluting there is a charge expensive setup but obviously in London it's been argued that it's very effective Is there any evidence about cost-benefit ratios in this scheme at all Clinical effectiveness in England which provides guidelines has recently looked at the evidence in relation to interventions on air pollution and health and they did review the evidence in relation to cost-effectiveness there was evidence that it was cost-effective and they came out with a figure for that so there is evidence there David It's interesting again from the panel about what other interventions can be used for example a scrappage scheme for old diesel vehicles to ban diesel buses within urban areas and have electric buses and the use of consolidation centres which are the Dutch model panellists may be aware of where heavy polluting delivery lorries go to outside the city to deliver goods and non-pluting electric vehicles are used to take the goods from the consolidation centre into the cities I actually saw one in the last session of Parliament and it was an excellent model I'm not suggesting that these are zero sum in other words you can have lowered mission and you can have scrappage schemes but I would be welcome any views from panellists on these various other options which I've put forward As I say look this is an area I haven't really read into but I think it's important the kind of implicitly in the question is the importance of making policy making not on a narrow basis but kind of on the round and one of my colleagues did a health impact assessment on a low emission zone in London before its introduction and when it went to public consultation let me say first time strongly in favour of them when it went to public consultation one of the issues that came up was say a small local charity who's running an old people carrier vehicle taking older people to a lunch club or something you know if you ban that sort of a vehicle in air pollution terms without something like a scrappage scheme and a help to the charity to actually get a better vehicle rather than no vehicle at all you've got health downsides as well as health upsides I think that the schemes are really good in principle and they need to be thought a bit about for unintended consequences Anybody else want to come in on this Finlay Carson Back that convener the Scottish Government's draft climate change plan has undertaken to work with a local authority to introduce a LEZ can the panel give their opinions on whether they think that's a positive move might there be to that there are no downsides more positives let's move to wrap this up I'm just direct to a question particularly at David Newby in Fenton Hurley if you were to be given one thing that could be done to bring about noticeable improvement in health in the area of air quality in an ideal world I'd like the centre of Glasgow and Edinburgh to be pedestrian zones with cycle pathways and not spend 1.95 billion on trams but on cycle pathways that make a city pleasant and enjoyable gives you the physical benefit of health and most people I'm going to be self-righteous now I cycle to work, I always have I cycle in a suit because they wear a suit's nonsense my wife cycles to work we barely use the car these things can be done and I think if you get the right environment it can be done and I know that's an easy thing to say and to convince lots of people to give up their car and get on a bike is difficult but if we get the environment where a city centre you can't cross easily with a car and you've got lovely big cycle pathways like they have in Holland that's my dream and we would get enormous health benefits from that he would indeed as Fintan has already pointed out and Fintan Hawley I think my suggestion is social rather than environmental so I think we're kind of along the way of it I would say integrated planning properly resourced supported by political will not only top down but bottom up which involves people understanding both the health and wellbeing issues and that something can be done about it even though it is a complex issue thank you very much can I thank all the witnesses in this first session can I also remind those who have undertaken to supply follow-up evidence if they could do that that would be most appreciated we're now going to have a short five minute break to change over to the next panel so I suspend for now so welcome back we will now hear from our second expert panel this is the policies and management strategies in relation to air quality in Scotland we're joined by Emilia Hannah from Friends of the Air Scotland Vince McNally from Sustainable Glasgow Will Garrett from the City of Edinburgh Council and Tom Rye from Napier University and Anna Heslop from Client Earth welcome to you all as I said at the start of the first panel if we could keep the questions and the answers short we would be able to cover the great deal of ground that we have in front of us over the next hour or so can I ask panellists what progress we have actually made in achieving air quality targets in Scotland over recent years what changes have we seen what improvements have we seen and are we on track to be a European leader or otherwise on better air quality who wants to go first Emilia Hannah just to put in context we have two streams of regulation on air quality we've got the Scottish statutory standards and the European legal limits and in terms of the Scottish standards as we heard earlier we have 38 air quality management areas and those are areas where the Scottish standards are being broken long after a deadline so those zones have been declared for particulate matter and the deadline for the achievement of those standards was 2010 and 27 are for nitrogen dioxide and the deadline for achievement under the Scottish standards was 2005 so I think it's fair to say that we are a long way behind where we need to be we see this as a public health emergency because as we've heard this morning that the health impacts are incredibly serious we know that public health England has calculated an attributable 2000 early deaths every year from fine particles PM 2.5 you asked the question about the cost of that DEFRA has undertaken a cost impact assessment and have found that the cost across the UK as a whole is 16 billion every year so when we calculate that roughly on a Scottish basis we're talking about 1.1 billion pounds every year to the Scottish economy from days lost at work and cost to the NHS so this is a significant health crisis and one that we need to tackle much more quickly I think Anna will be able to talk in more detail about the European legal limits but just to set the scene European law required us to have to reach a limit for nitrogen dioxide by 2010 we're now 2017 and four parts of Scotland are in breach of that binding legal limit so for the purposes of European law Scotland is divided into six zones and in four of those areas we are in continued breach of European law so we see that we are well behind and we need much tougher action specifically on transport and I think we can point the finger quite firmly at transport, traffic and use of the private car well behind where we need to be but how does that compare to the rest of Europe not to offer excuses but I'm just looking to get a picture here well in terms of the UK as a whole and Anna might correct me if I'm wrong I understand is it 23 zones? Sorry, there are 43 zones in the whole of the UK and 37 of those are in breach of the limit values for NO2 at the moment we are by no means the only member state that's in breach of the NO2 limits there are I think 23 member states in breach of either NO2 or PM or both so it's not the case that Scotland is the only place in Europe breaching the limits but I would not say that we are doing better than anyone else in Europe either OK, it's useful to get that quantified Vincent Acanalli I mean I can certainly give a perspective on Glasgow as a largest city and what the air quality is like there it's fair to say air quality is presenting a very real risk to public health today however to get things in perspective air quality within Glasgow since the industrial revolution we now have over 97 per cent of the city meeting all air quality targets including the Scottish objectives which as we know are the most stringent in Europe and the more stringent in the rest of the UK we have seen a continual improvement and decrease in pollution levels being recorded across the city over the last five years we have no evidence of particulates objectives anywhere in the city and to pick up on a point you made earlier on about how does that compare to Europe that's really good compared to Europe where they are experiencing particulates of PM10 over 30 microg per metre cubed in Glasgow we are getting levels between 15 and 16 microg per metre cubed in our worst areas so there are problems with air quality within the city they are relatively localised to areas where there is high levels of traffic but to be realistic about it and to answer the question which was about how have we been progressing over the past few years the answer is that it has been improving continuously we will get it I think I would reflect the comments made by Vincent with respect to Edinburgh by no means complacent about the situation but it is an improving picture that we are seeing we have six air quality management areas one for PM10s and five for NO2 and the five for NO2 all show an improving picture across the city so the general context is one of an improving picture as I say we are by no means complacent and there are a whole range of issues that we need to address in terms of trying to deal with the exceedances that we have in those areas but it is against that picture of an improving situation Anna Hyslop so it's just worth recognising that as the situation is improving the problem is that it's a public health emergency and the situation is not improving fast enough so what the directive says is that you must meet those emissions limit as soon as possible in as short a time as possible and that's not what's happening at the moment so that Clean Air for Scotland strategy was prepared in 2015 it fed into air quality plans which were prepared at UK level in the State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs in London those plans were the High Court told the UK Government in November last year that those plans were not adequate and they had been sent away to redo them because they are not aiming to reduce the air pollution as soon as in as short a time as possible so it's worth just bearing that in mind and my understanding is that the Clean Air for Scotland strategy is not currently under review those new air quality plans by the High Court in November were due to have come out last Monday they are now going to come out on the 9th of May and it would be very disappointing if Scotland's ambition has not increased Okay, Angus MacDonald do you want to come in on that? I'm just picking up on the issue of AQMAs you've heard me mention to the previous panel about the sulphur dioxide issue in Greenchmouth and it had helped to concentrate mines particularly with Ineos who invested £30 million in a sulphur recovery tailgas unit now would you agree that that particular AQMA at the risk of being perochial was the driver of which encouraged Ineos to take that action and particularly I'd be keen to hear from Emilia Hanna because I know she's shown a significant interest in the past compared to the issues in Greenchmouth and other hotspots in Scotland Certainly I'm pleased to hear that progress is being made in the Greenchmouth AQMA if I can maybe reflect more generally on AQMAs and what the regime requires of local authorities they can certainly be useful in focusing mines and raising awareness they're under the Scottish statutory system the local air quality management system which is governed by sections 84 and 85 of the environment act they place an obligation on local authorities to monitor and declare air quality management areas where there is a risk of exceedence of the standards however there is no overall duty on local authorities to achieve the targets so we have something of an accountability gap and perhaps that's the reason why since the local air quality management regime came into existence we've only ever had four air quality management areas that have been revoked now we don't necessarily think that the buck needs to stop with local authorities but they should certainly be given more support by the Scottish Government to implement effective measures and one of the weaknesses that we can see in air quality action plans is that often there are a range of measures proposed which don't necessarily tally up or show what the expected reductions in any given pollutant are meant to be so if we look at Glasgow's air quality action plan for example we can't necessarily say okay if we take all of the measures in the plan this is going to add up and this is going to secure compliance with the standards so there are gaps within the system certainly particularly just since we were discussing air quality management areas it's worth noting that the entire administrative boundary of Glasgow was declared an air quality management area for PM 10 at one point because levels of PM 10 across the city were above the objective improvements in air quality have seen that now revoked we now have three separate areas that are air quality management areas and we will be moving this year to revoke the park head cross air quality management area because levels of nitrogen dioxide within that area now meet the objective so we are reducing air quality management areas as a result of improvements in air quality Mark Ruskell do you want to develop this general theme? If I could just go back to the client's earth legal challenge in the High Court to what extent did that challenge focus on the Scottish Government's strategies or was it entirely focused on the overarching UK strategy? So it was focused on the overarching UK strategy the UK Government is responsible for preparing that air quality plan at national level but the Scottish Government is responsible for meeting the limit values in Scotland that's my understanding of how that breaks down so that plan is co-authored by the Scottish Government it has your logo on it and it is obviously there is some feeding into that system behind the scenes but the challenge was against the Secretary of State in London So in order to meet these compliance levels for nitrous oxide particularly in areas like Glasgow which are breaching what do you think needs to change in the Scottish Government's strategy to deliver that objective? So the Scottish Government strategy aims for a date of 2020 it's not entirely clear how that date is come to in the Cleaner Air for Scotland strategy one of the criticisms that the High Court had was that the date was not sufficiently close that the UK Government had gone for across the entire strategy and that was partly because of the way that they had decided to do their modelling so we heard about modelling in the last session there are two different types of modelling you do modelling to work out what the current air quality situation is based on the monitoring that you have and then you model that across the country but in the context of air quality plans you also have modelling of what air quality will be like going forward and what the different measures the impacts that different measures will have on air quality going forward and they had modelled that with the sort of aiming for 2020 and 2025 as dates for compliance that's not good enough you have to do it as soon as possible that could be 2018 or 2019 so that's one weakness that I would see in that Cleaner Air for Scotland strategy the other thing that the UK Government did and it's not clear from the Cleaner Air for Scotland strategy to me whether this has also been the approach of the Scottish Government is they modelled based on emissions factors for diesel vehicles that were overly ambitious so we know that in real world driving diesel vehicles are not emitting the amounts of pollution that they show in laboratory conditions and they were basing their modelling on laboratory conditions what diesel vehicles ought to be emitting rather than what they knew they are actually emitting in real world conditions so I don't know with the Scottish plan because it's not clear from the information available whether that's also a flaw in the Scottish input any other thoughts on that from around the table too I think Cleaner Air for Scotland on the transport side is rather weak in several specific areas particularly freight if you think about the contribution of HGVs to air pollution the Cleaner Air for Scotland really only has policies which are encouraging freight operators to take up cleaner practices and I think there's clear evidence from other European countries that it's possible to do more than that I can go in later into what you could do another area where I think it's rather weak is on trunk roads local authorities are not the only ones who control roads transport Scotland controls roads one third of air quality management areas have a trunk road running through them and they carry a higher proportion of heavy vehicles than the local roads and once again in grants of trunk roads Cleaner Air for Scotland it really doesn't make any commitments whatsoever really apart from one specific air quality management area in grief where in fact it then puts the owners on a local authority there are several areas further detail where the Cleaner Air for Scotland is very weak on transport and isn't planning to do enough fast enough I echo the points that have been made about Cleaner Air for Scotland being weak on transport also that it includes very few new policies and what was clearly required from the Supreme Court ruling was new measures which showed increased ambition on tackling air pollution one of the main things that Cleaner Air for Scotland introduced is a national low emissions framework which is an appraisal process by which measures could be identified which would tackle air pollution including things like low emissions zones so that could have been useful but it has been running behind schedule a fair bit so under I think it's LP 10 one of the actions in Cleaner Air for Scotland the national low emissions framework by April 2016 the criteria tests, processes were meant to have been developed agreed and finalised but we're now in 2017 and the NLEF has yet to be consulted on so it has become something of a stumbling block towards the delivery of the Scottish Government's ambition for a low emissions zone by 2018 which I should say is something that we support so progress has been quite slow through Cleaner Air for Scotland another weakness again is that it doesn't quantify what the impact of the 83 policy measures that it proposes to introduce would be so there's no way does that add up to delivery of the legal limits by 2020 I was just to pick up on a point mark raised in relation to the emissions factors that go into the modelling yet it's true that vehicles do emit more in real world environment than they do as they're lab tested but the emissions factors are revised to take account of the evidence that's becoming aware of in relation to that I'm struggling to understand what the Scottish Government should be doing ahead of the 9th of May that seems like a very tricky deadline for the Scottish Government to meet what do you think they should be doing right now my understanding and the evidence that the UK Government gave to the court last week is that those plans are ready so they have already been prepared so I'm not sure the Scottish Government can do anything between now and the 9th of May I'm very surprised that following that high court judgement in November last year there was no review of the Scottish plan I very much hope that the Scottish Government has been discussing with its colleagues in Westminster what ought to go into this new revised air quality plan but I'm not aware of what's been going on behind the scenes there may have been there may have been but there are certain things in that Clean Air for Scotland plan which you would want to re-look at on the basis of the high court judgement as well as those issues that I mentioned earlier in terms of your national low emissions framework part of that strategy it talks about a business case and the high court was very clear that that is not something that you ought to be taking into account it's a fairly large chunk of that national low emissions framework Are the UK Government accepting that high court ruin? They haven't appealed it Perhaps this is too quickly to do before the 9th of May but I think that the Clean Air for Scotland really needs to incorporate stronger measures on low emissions zones to be a leader in Europe then we should follow the example of quite a number of our European counterparts Italy, Germany, Sweden having more than one low emissions zone in the whole of the United Kingdom and they can be introduced without enormous political upheaval so I'm very surprised that the Clean Air for Scotland doesn't take a stronger lead on that because ultimately the legislation under which the decisions would have to be finally approved by the Scottish Government in any case so I think that's what should be in there if we want to do more Richard Lyle I turn to air quality governance effectiveness of current policy support and incentives and that collection Amelia Hanna and Anna Hyslop said there's a public health emergency but George Curley for the NHS says that they don't really gather data regarding local reporting in pollution do we have the right policies in place are they sufficiently ambitious are they being effectively implemented and successful addressing the issues and should the NHS be involved more over to you ladies well to pick up on was it monitoring specifically our understanding of air quality something that maybe was overlooked in the earlier session is that we do have a very detailed network driven by the local authorities based on diffusion tubes so we have the 95 automatic monitoring stations which tell us what air quality is like on an hourly basis we also have little cost effective bits of kit that can show what the situation is on the ground in more depth and I should say that in relation to Glasgow and City Centre we know that last year I think 17 of the 28 locations where nitrogen dioxide is monitored were in breach of the Scottish standard so we do have quite a detailed picture local authorities also have done some excellent work in source apportionment so understanding where the main sources of air pollution come from in the urban setting and we know that in the urban setting traffic is the dominant cause I think across the UK as a whole on average 80% of urban nitrogen dioxide is from traffic Edinburgh Council have done an excellent further assessment report it's called from 2013 which tells us where the sources of the pollution is and we know from that report for example that only between 5% and 7% of the nitrogen dioxide is from regional background sources so a lot of the urban pollution is caused by traffic and it is within the local authorities the Scottish Government's control to be able to do something about so I think we do have a sufficient evidence base that shows us that traffic is the dominant cause what we still have is a lack of political will specifically a lack of ambition on demand management and I'd like to point the finger at cars if I may because again from Edinburgh's source apportionment work from 2013 we know that cars in many cases are the dominant cause of pollution in some instances it can be buses but a lot of the time those buses are caused to idle they're trapped in congestion so we need cars that are actually people who cause pollution by driving them well precisely but we certainly need the policies in place and I take your point to help people to make the right choices and you know the priority areas that we see are for cutting car use by enabling workplace parking levees, stricter parking controls to see a roll-out of 20mph zones being made the default in urban settings we want to see congestion charging looked at and we want to see a strong network of low emission zones not just in one city but in all of the major cities with air pollution problems and particularly low emission zones that will support buses to make the transition to cleaner emission standards requires buy-in from the public and significant behavioural change I mean I think that there has been a lot of awareness raising over air pollution in the last few years and I think that the public is on board with the fact that it is a problem certainly it's always difficult to have measures which specifically attack the car but there are other measures which I think the public would support last week for example there were over a thousand people who came to the Scottish Parliament saying we want more investment in cycling and an active travel we know that cycling is a big part of the solution again with public transport the sector is in decline that's something that needs to be looked at if we can get more buses on the roads that could be a big way to overcome congestion we know for example that one double decker bus costs up to 75 cars off the road so these are the things that need investment and we've got to remember with the car that 30 per cent of households in Scotland don't actually have access to a car in Glasgow it's 50 per cent so there are a lot of people out there who are trapped in transport poverty who need better public transport better access to walking and cycling options and this would benefit air quality as well Thank you I obviously come from a specific background coming from the Royal Town Planning Institute but one thing I think we really welcomed about the strategy is the fact that it has put a major emphasis on placemaking we heard earlier on from the session about the need to create healthy places for people so that's great I think the issue we have with that is sometimes the idea of trying to think about places is overlooked at a local level when we tend to look at things in terms of programmes strategies, initiatives, disciplines how all these different things work together at the same time to create that place to be much more proactive much more forward thinking on how we do that so there are some very good hooks in there to try and make sure that placemaking works but at a local level we need to try and make sure that that approach, strategy that mindset is actually implemented Do you recognise the comment made in the first panel about the location of new schools predominantly in your major roads? Yeah, well I don't know the details of whether that's the case or not the interesting thing for me about that was provision on new schools is more than a planning issue it's an asset management issue it's a finance issue and what we've tended to find is that your head planner is not always involved in some of those discussions at the start of the process so the placemaking element's not there it's very much decided on a financial thing or an asset management basis as well so we actually put out some proposals recently as part of the planning review for what we're calling a chief planning officer to be a statutory post in each local authority and there's someone who is consulted early and engaged with early in the process so that we can figure out what the implications or ramifications are of a decision be it on an asset or an investment so there's a need to try and push that much more front loaded and much more upstream in the process Okay, thanks, Tom Ryan I was just going to raise very briefly the issue of the politics of introducing low emission zones as I said before, Germany most medium and large sized towns have a low emission zone how does that low emission zone function essentially it bans vehicles bans private cars and commercial vehicles that don't meet certain emission characteristics and or impose a charge small daily charge on those vehicles that don't so it's requiring people to either change their vehicle or retrofit their vehicle or simply not drive into that area now I'm not aware of a wave of political disasters in German local politics arising from the introduction of these low emission zones which have been going on since the early 2000s as far as I'm aware similarly in Italy and most Italian cities have some form of low emission zone the people in these countries are accepting these changes also in terms of the economic impact I think freight operators will also will always raise the economic impact of any regulation that might require them to upgrade their vehicles clearly countries like Germany and Sweden have continued to be economically successful whilst introducing stricter air quality management regulations than we have so I think we need to be circumspect about the possible political impacts or the political difficulty of introducing certainly low emission zones and there needs to be some speed there needs to be steps taken very quickly to get more low emission zones in place I'm just a couple of points to pick up on that I mean I echo Melia's comments about the monitoring and data collection that we have I mean we have extensive ability to report on what the current levels of air quality are within our cities but the source apportionment work that we've been doing or that we have done in working with SEPA has thrown up some interesting facts and figures about what's going on in certain streets and it does vary quite a bit within the city so for example in Hope Street where we have the most polluted street within Glasgow, we know that 70 to 80% of that pollution comes from the buses on other streets such as Great Western Road we know that it's run about 70% of the pollution on that comes from cars so it depends what the traffic is on a particular road and we really need to focus on where we want to clean up and it's better to focus efforts on first of all because Great Western Road meets the air quality objective so you know it's kind of clear what we can be targeting there and we want to see buses cleaned up for other reasons in terms of just meeting the targets we want people to use public transport the people that are on the buses are travelling into are exposed to more pollution than the people that are in the cars that are travelling quicker through that area and they don't stop regularly with the door open, with the engine running while people come on and off the bus the bus drivers, the taxi drivers that are travelling through those areas are exposed to higher levels of pollution so it's important that those parts of the fleet are cleaned up in terms of acceptability this is just my own personal view I would see that the public are always going to be accepting low emission zones as long as it's somebody else that's having to clean up their fleet maybe if we are going to talk about privately owned vehicles not being compliant that's a difficult decision for anyone to take to say your diesel vehicle is six years old and now does not comply with the emission standards because we are talking about Euro 6 for diesels Euro 4 for petrol so you are talking about diesel cars that are really only a couple of years old being satisfied to get into a low emission zone that's going to be quite a challenge to sell that to the public I know in Germany and across Europe there has been more acceptance of low emission zones they are starting at a different place as I mentioned earlier on levels of particulate pollution in mainland Europe are far higher than they are in Scotland and that may be the driving factor that has seen that accepted in addition, Germany has handed out a lot of grants for commercial fleets to be upgraded and for scapage deals for people to replace older vehicles and I know that the scapage was mentioned earlier on I would just say briefly on the scapage that there can be unintended consequences of things like scapage deals the past scapage deal that was introduced for cars saw people get rid of older relatively low polluting petrol cars and have them replaced with diesel vehicles which we now know causes a problem the other thing is a general scapage deal everywhere doesn't focus effort on areas where we have air pollution problems if you're driving a diesel vehicle out in the middle of the countryside the impact that's happened is negligible it's where it's within the city centres that we have problems with diesel we're getting into the low emissions zones and I'm going to let Dave Stewart come in on this now and develop that theme in a second but presumably if we talk about a small charge for private car users going into low emission zones and that would perhaps drive behavioural change equally if you were charging polluting buses to go into the zones that would drive change in the practices of the fleet owners they might go and introduce hybrid buses electric vehicles etc would you see that being a possibility? I think a low emission zone could be the stick that's needed to have fleets improved in the past Glasgow's offered grants for bus operators to fit abatement technology to their buses that would bring an old Euro 3 bus up to the almost Euro 6 and this would be in addition to the green bus fund that the Scottish Government provides and we didn't have any bus operators in the city to take us up on that it was 80 per cent of the cost of the funding that we would provide and nobody took it up so there's the potential for grant funding on the one hand and a low emission zone on the other hand to encourage fleet operators to improve their vehicles okay that's interesting Tom Wright and then Mulea Hannah then David Development Just some data from a large low emission zone in Germany, Berlin 1.1 million residents, 85 square kilometres it's quite old data this I'm afraid but when it was introduced in 2008 within the year within the first year there was a 35 per cent fall in particular matters and 19 per cent fall in nitrogen oxide concentrations so that covers cars as well as commercial vehicles on buses it's very difficult to encourage operators as we heard even if there are incentives available to change their fleet if you have no direct control over their fleet of course we should remember that in the rest of continental Europe buses are either directly owned by the public sector or secured under franchise contracts and that gives far far more possibilities and control to the franchising authorities to improve the emissions characteristics of the buses so for example in Scorn and South West Sweden which is an area of about 1.25 million people around Malmö but with quite a lot of characteristics similar to Scotland that area there has an almost completely biogas fleet because it is a franchised arrangement now how much does that cost in terms of subsidy into the bus industry or public money into the bus industry on a per head basis it's about £90 a year and Scotland will be putting about £60 a year into our bus industry the clean bus grant has enabled 469 buses probably about a fleet of about 8,000 buses across Scotland to be improved but quite a lot of those are improved to Euro 5 or Euro 6 diesel not to anything cleaner than that so in that part of Sweden there's an order of magnitude changing the emissions characteristics of the buses which frankly has been brought about because of the different regulatory system we've got a transport building that might as well go through the Scottish Parliament soon and I trust that it will take on board a lot of the parts of the buses bill that's just been made law in England which will allow local franchising of bus services and therefore control or more control over the nature of the bus fleet okay it's a really important issue but we're getting caught up in it can I, we'll get it because you've been trying to catch my attention for something thank you bus issue very briefly where Edinburgh is a partner in the ownership of Lothian buses by the end of this year 75% of the bus fleet will be Euro 6 or better so that sense of having an opportunity to influence what happens is important I just wanted to go back to the source apportionment discussion and it's right we do have a good understanding now of what the issues are in which particular AQMA and that does mean we can think about how to address the particular problems and with, there are if you like, three forms of traffic that make up the problem one being buses and as I say with a partnership with the buses we can ensure that the fleet is in relatively good order and the better buses of the least polluting buses will then be the ones that go through the AQMAs so we can address the issue of bus pollution through that process with lorries and vans we have a programme which is more a voluntary one something called EcoStars where we work with them in terms of how they develop their their routing and their driving and we try and produce fewer miles per lorrie or van the real issue is, as has been said with cars where there's no kind of partnership that can be brought about with individual people other than persuasion we have a raft of planning policies that we do use to try and encourage a shift from car ownership a modal shift as has been discussed and promoting electric cars and a range of other things which no doubt we'll come to later on but in a broad context of what the problem is within the AQMAs cars is the one thing that we have more difficulty with than the other forms of transport Briefly Emilia-Hara Just to echo the point I think Edinburgh's population is expected to grow by 28% by 2037 so we need to think about how to make the most efficient use of our road space One thing that Edinburgh council is not able to do is introduce workplace parking levies or any levies over large parking spaces because the legislation does not exist through the Transport Act so one plea that we would make to Parliament is that when the next transport bill is passed it needs to make it possible for local authorities to levy workplace parking levies Thank you There has been a lot of discussion rightly about low-admission zones I'm particularly interested in asking our two local authority representatives and each other witnesses about how discussions are going with Scottish Government over low-admission zones If we'd either of you be in a position to be the pilot next year when it's due to start I'll start with Mr Garrett Discussions have been on-going The issue we've had or the point we've come to is not that we are unwilling to participate in this in fact Edinburgh is willing to do it we need to understand what the resource implications are going to be for that it's... it would be an additional cost on the local authority and we just need to have a better understanding of what that implication is and specifically the nature of how a low-admission zone would work whether it would be focused on buses or on cars as well and as I say in Edinburgh buses are not such an issue as cars and that makes it difficult without introducing number plate recognition which as we heard earlier is a very expensive process they bring in the London model and as you know they bring in the ultra low-admission zone in 2019 you would have heard the earlier evidence where I think I'm correct saying that the figure to set the scheme up in London initial scheme is 100 million using camera technology to detect the licence plates of vehicles and finding which are Euro 6 or other and charging them thereafter I mean that's a huge amount of funding have you had any decisions with that level of detail a camera recognition system for the pilot next year? Do you know that level of detail? I don't know that level of detail I'll perhaps bring Mr McNally in then I've also said to declare an interest I have had letter back from City of Glasgow about this but I won't steal your thunder in this with McNally I mean a converse of issue around costs if you were offered the pilot next year would you position to run it? Well I'm not in a position to give that statement because that would have to go through our committee process my role as a team leader within the air quality team is to carry out the appraisal process for low emission zones that's an appraisal process that should be coming out through the NLEF and the Cleaner Air for Scotland strategy it's not out yet so we've not been able to work through the appraisal process as of yet in terms of the resources we don't know yet what the resources would be to have an all singing and dancing low emission zone using automatic number plate technology like you said that's also my understanding that the London scheme cost £100 million to set up and run for a number of years however that is the Rolls Royce of low emission zones it's a huge low emission zone the biggest one in the world that I'm aware of that's not quite the scale we would need here but what was interesting was that the DFT costed clean air zones for the five cities in England that were identified through the national air quality plan and they came with a figure for five cities probably equivalent to Glasgow's size of a total cost of about £101 million so back of a cigarette packet that might be not the best analogy to use but we could be looking at maybe £20 million for a scheme the size of Glasgow if you were to just divide that sum by five and that's only the cost to set up the technology and run the back room so on for say five, ten years the cost for the operators of vehicles that are non-compliant to make them compliant whether it's either retrofitting it's approximately £14,000 to £15,000 per bus to upgrade it a new bus obviously costs over £100,000 there are real challenges with the timescale of getting that work done to get the vehicles compliant within that time a bus takes about two years from setting in an order before you'll actually have a new one retrofitting an individual bus can take three to four days to fit the... so it's a logistical challenge to do that technical point, I appreciate the whole details not being released yet but in London, as I mentioned there's a complete coverage of vehicles entering and exiting London is there any such existing system in Glasgow at all that could be upgraded do you have a comma recognition system that covers any of Glasgow that could be currently used or would it have to be a complete start from scratch if it's going to be that Rolls Royce solution I appreciate there's other ways of running us on Before you answer that I can't be clear are you saying that in spite of the fact that you have the most polluted street in Scotland Glasgow and looking at the range of options to tackle that haven't looked in detail at a low emission zone and linked into that that would be the cost of set up and running it what would be the cost of the income that would be generated by vehicles paying well there's a couple of things there first of all we looked at low emission zones as far back as 2010 when we had a detailed feasibility study done to examine the case for low emission zones and that was looking at buses as a target area however we weren't able to progress that because of all that was about 2010 that was when we started to become aware of the fact that the engine technology did not do what it was supposed to do so we couldn't then progress a scheme when you could only get a Euro 4, Euro 5 buses and we knew that it didn't work so it's only since the Euro 6 buses have come out that we know that this will tackle nitrogen dioxide because the London low emission zone and the other ones don't have a Euro 6 standard set for them they've got a Euro 3 and Euro 4 in places that will do next to nothing to improve to reduce levels of N02 in Glasgow it's going to have to be Euro 6 so yes we're continuing to look at that within the city I'm forgetting what was the second part of the question that might be generated by it the income from it well it's unlikely to be an income generating scheme because the idea of it is to encourage people to improve their vehicle it's not like a congestion charge where you're expecting people to pay a daily charge the idea is that you have a fine set for non-compliant vehicle's intern that's set high enough that people don't want to come in if their vehicle doesn't comply so it won't be about revenue raising it will be about not even in the initial stages where people fall foul of it that's not been that kind of level of detail of the costings has not been completed sorry David I think that the convener has touched on the point that I was going to raise but in London as you know there is the 10 pound tuxetry or t-charge so there is an income generation to that as you've probably picked up I'm very enthusiastic about low emission zones my issue is just about the bureaucracy of this we're going to see a pilot next year what is it that both of you local authorities will require from government to make an educated decision about going ahead with the pilot I would say that pilot of any low emission zone is going to be dependent on the resources and funding that are available to us and as of yet we don't have that information Mr Garrett I can only repeat those comments we're in exactly the same situation where we need to understand what the resource implications are I guess the other thing I would add is that we have discussed this with some of our local politicians and there has been concern about the possibility of displacement around a low emission zone and what impact that might have on what are likely to be relatively quiet suburban streets just to add to that the query about the bureaucracy of the system how long it's going to take to do please correct me if I'm wrong but I understand that the enabling legislation for this would be the congestion charging powers under the 2001 Transport Scotland Act now when the city of Edinburgh in 2003 to 2005 developed detailed plans for congestion charging in the city of Edinburgh there was a lengthy process of well the city officials involved working very closely with Scottish Government officials to develop their relevant guidance and that took a lot longer than the period between now and 2018 so I think it's very useful to know that there is primary legislation there I suppose my final point is when I put this to the cabinet secretary in 21st of February 2007 about can we have it sooner and how many can we have she said and I'm quoting local authorities to look at them now I thought that was the other way round if I was a local authority leader I would want to know what the package is what the resources are available so I could implement that through the various committees what's the views of our two local authority representatives about this is it something you just bid for but if there's nothing too bid for how do you implement the pilot Mr Gareth we have been in discussions with the Scottish Government about this as have the four main cities and we still don't know what the offer is it's not that we don't want to take the best steps that we can take in order to address the issues but it is going to be resource intensive and it's going to be very costly and so we need to understand what that means for a local authority before we can commit ourselves to that the only other thing is will there be grant funding or assistance available for fleet operators to improve their fleets at the same time because it's not just the cost of the local authority it's going to be the cost to the bus operators who will almost inevitably pass that on to their customers if there's not assistance for them and that may then lead to people not using buses going back into the car because people always operate in their own best interests if it's going to be cheaper for them to take the car in instead of using the bus if the fares go up we're going to have a real problem there, we want them on buses but we want them on cleaner buses and the only other things we would just add in would be in terms of the legislation it's my understanding that if we are talking about a low mission zone being introduced to legislation that would be used would be the way that would be done would be through traffic regulation orders now a TRO if there is an objection to it it can take a considerable time to get through for a local authority especially if it's controversial or if there are any challenges to it it's not unusual for delays through the appeal process to drag it on for a year or two I want to move on to the rural setting but before Emma Harper has a brief supplementary just a quick supplementary has there been any thoughts about carpool lanes or incentivising employers to do a reward system for car sharing in a previous job I had that worked I'm just wondering carpool lanes at a specific time of the day or specific days or even just for electric vehicles is that an option well certainly what we would say is that that would probably fit into the travel planning for larger employers and that's something that we as a local authority we've got our own travel plan and we condition certain developments through the planning process to have travel plans in place for their staff and that can be included within that in terms of actually making roads base available for carpooling or car sharing we don't have wide enough roads within the city to do that you would be creating more congestion which would slow the traffic down even more on the pollution levels there's the quality of the vehicles that are on the road but one of the biggest problems we have in the city is just the topography of it the high-rise buildings create the canyons that prevent the pollution being dispersed we don't have the relatively narrow streets we don't have that road space to introduce additional lanes for things like that there may be an option on some of the trunk roads I can't really answer for that because that's a Transport Scotland matter that is controlled by the local authority but it might be an option for them to consider Peter Chapman Can I change the focus and have a look at agriculture for a week while we know that NO and nitrous oxide emissions are 31% of the agricultural emissions but we also know that nitrogen is an important input for agricultural production but usage in the last number of years has been falling of nitrogen so how can we continue to use nitrogen more efficiently in agriculture and are NO emissions rising, falling or static at the moment? Professor Bob Rees and I think I need to pose eyes to you I don't think I mentioned you at the start No problem so maybe I could answer that because I work on agricultural emissions so maybe it's just worth clarifying first of all what these emissions are we've talked a lot about nitrogen today and nitrogen is a pretty complicated element to get your head round so agriculture is responsible for emitting small amounts of nitric oxide it doesn't emit nitrogen dioxide which is the gas that we've been talking about in urban settings but nitric oxide can be oxidised to nitrogen dioxide in the atmosphere can make a small contribution to that but it's not really significant relative to the transport emissions but agriculture as you mentioned emits large amounts of nitrous oxide which is a completely different gas which is a greenhouse gas and it doesn't have a direct impact on human health only indirectly through the climate change impacts that it causes and the other nitrogen gas that agriculture is responsible for emitting is ammonia which we heard more a little bit about in the first session so in answer to one of the questions in that session ammonia emissions are actually increasing from agriculture we're going to be suffering consequences of not reaching targets for emission reductions of ammonia and ammonia causes all sorts of problems it's an indirect greenhouse gas it causes problems of biodiversity causes acidification and so on so whole raft of issues there your question was about also how could we continue to use nitrogen in agriculture in a more environmentally friendly way I think that's quite a complex question itself nitrogen is critical to agriculture our production systems are dependent on inputs of nitrogen in all sorts of ways so we do need to continue to use it but there are lots of things small steps that we can take to increase the efficiency of nitrogen use so there are technical fixes there are more efficient farming processes farming continually improves its efficiency so precision agriculture is something that's coming through at the moment I think that's going to help there's probably no silver bullet and some of the things that we would need to do are going to be somewhat costly we've done a sort of cost analysis of various measures and there are things that can be done at low cost and others start increasing in cost so one of the issues is how we get finance into the industry to support that and then finally it's not all about supply there's also the demand issue and what products people actually want to eat from our food industry so certain products so meat products for example are associated with higher inputs and higher emissions than plant-based products so there's an issue both of supply and demand in terms of trying to reduce emissions but if I recall correctly the evidence suggests that changing behaviours in an agricultural sector saves money so there is a benefit and in the last Parliament there was a push to introduce mandatory carbon audits that was from a climate change perspective but I just wonder to what extent carbon audits might be beneficial to air quality so the carbon audits in agriculture are designed at promoting this increased efficiency that I've been talking about they make farmers and land owners aware of the emissions that are associated with their enterprise they would be designed to improve nutrient use efficiency and reduce emissions of the greenhouse gases primarily so they wouldn't have a direct health benefit other than sort of efficiencies that would be achieved by reduced ammonia emissions You did say that ammonia emissions are rising at the moment You didn't answer my question are nitrous oxide emissions are they rising, falling or static at the moment? Nitrous oxide emissions are pretty static I mean at the last year which 2014 that we have a report for show a very small increase but it's for the last three or four years they've been pretty static so as a proportion of total greenhouse gas emissions agriculture is actually increasing in the sector in the economy just come in on that very briefly sorry but why is ammonia rising and what can we do about that it's rising because we're not really doing anything to tackle it there are no measures really being encouraged in the UK other countries are taking more proactive approach to trying to reduce ammonia losses there are things that we could do but they often cost money and that's an issue so that precludes a lot of the measures that we could take I was just going to say that I'm a farmer myself and I recognise that the new technologies are making a huge difference targeted inputs and accurate soil mapping and targeting inputs to that can certainly make a huge difference both to the environmental impact of agriculture and also to the bottom line because it pays as the convener says it saves money when you do it properly so what other research is being carried out into these practices and how much progress is being made in understanding opportunities for mitigation and improving the reporting of these emissions we've made a lot of progress in the last five or six years or so through improving the modelling of emissions from agriculture and that's helped to identify where we should get mitigation opportunities I think there are still big uncertainties in emissions of greenhouse gases and pollutants from agriculture because of the biological nature of the processes we're dealing with these aren't engines and technical fixes that we can introduce they're much more diffuse pollution sources so the uncertainties are quite large so you mentioned precision farming this is being promoted a lot I think it provides some potential for improved efficiency the research at the moment is still at a fairly early stage in terms of demonstrating reductions for example in greenhouse gas emissions and that's one of the things we're working on at the moment so we hope within the next few years we'll be able to quantify that but at the moment it's quite difficult to put a number on it Mark Ruskell Whether the planning system is adequately taking into account air quality issues and we heard the example earlier on about the planning of schools and the various pressures that councils find themselves under there but I met with a group of constituents yesterday in Schoon and they had a concern because they're faced with a number of developments locally housing developments which individually wouldn't be assessed for their impact on air quality but collectively could make a significant difference particularly to the nearby air quality management area at Bridgend could impact on health but this seems to be an issue that hasn't been dealt with within that local development plan process neither does it seem to be adequately addressed within a local transport strategy and I'm hearing other kind of examples around Scotland of this as well the planning system perhaps not adequately dealing with air quality impact so I wonder if Craig McClaren could perhaps start with some thoughts on that and how perhaps planning reforms or tweaks the system might might improve I think that the policy context for planning and air quality is there of sorts if you look at the national planning framework in Scottish planning policy the referred to air quality but they were published before the Cleaner for Scotland strategy was announced so there's a bit of work to be done on that I think the other thing is that there's a timing issue here in that many of the new style local development plans which have been put in place are still being developed and still haven't been adopted as yet so issues like air quality probably weren't taken into consideration in earlier versions but they are starting to be taken into consideration now so I think there's a bit of a timing issue which we need to address with that that said I think one of the things that planners are trained to do is to look at the cumulative impact of a range of different developments and to see what the impact of that is so we need to think through how that could be made to work in practice we've been doing some work with Environmental Protection Scotland and with CEPA we published in January a guidance note for local authority planners and for people working in air quality to try and make sure that they have a better understanding of their quality issues and how planners could deal with it so there's much more detailed guidance that could be done now and I'm happy to provide a copy of that or a link to the committee if you want to see that as well we've also been looking at how we can introduce training for planners in particular and we've done some work on that one of the issues that we've had and it goes back to a point I made earlier is that they are the silver bullet it's not planning which is just the silver bullet planning sits within a broader local government and public sector landscape and many other aspects of that public sector landscape have a more of an impact on things than planning so what we've been trying to do is to make sure that air quality is addressed at a community planning level as well which brings together as you know many of the different public sector bodies and organisations tries to align their approaches to things and tries to see how they can hold their resources together to make things work more effectively so that the least bit broader look at this as well as just a planning side of things Will Garrett wants to come in? Sorry, Will Garrett wants to come in then Tom Wright Thank you Planning to subject it's close to my heart I'm a planner by discipline and I now have responsibility for developing the local transport strategy and air quality and placemaking so within the reorganisation that's taken place within Edinburgh City Council there's been a recognition that there's a need to bring these disciplines together in order to have a serious impact on the outcomes and it's the outcomes that we're all really concerned with and the outcomes are largely driven by the health agenda so I think at a sort of strategic level thinking about how we can improve outcomes for people in our towns and cities and countryside it's necessary to bring all these disciplines together as has been said in Clean Air for Scotland as has been said in the review of the planning documentation and indeed the review of the national transport strategy all talk about this but I suppose the timing has been good for ourselves in Edinburgh because as part of the response to the cuts we've had to make we've reorganised ourselves in a way that can help deliver things in a coordinated and coherent way so that's the first point I wanted to make in terms of the more detailed planning issues the local development plan does guide growth to locations which are accessible in terms of active travel and public transport that's part of the process of identifying growth areas and the local development plan is supported by the action programme and the action programme itself our own latest action programme sets out something like 90 site specific active travel actions that can take place in order to try and help shift people or give people an option when they get out of their front door as to whether they're going to go into the car use a bike, walk go to a park and ride site and it's giving people options that's, I think, part of the answer to addressing the issues in terms of planning two points, cleaner air Scotland with regard to regional and local transport strategies made a commitment to review the guidance on local and regional transport strategies the guidance on local transport strategies was, I think, produced in the year 2000 I've not seen any review of these guidance notes come out since cleaner air Scotland was published so that might be something that could be recommended Secondly, just to emphasise the incredible importance of land use planning in people's travel choices an example of a cycling city that's often brought up is the city of Groningen in northern Netherlands which has a very, very high mode share by cycle what I'd like to emphasise is the importance of planning in bringing that about a long-term planning strategy is ensured that 78% of residents live within 3km of the city centre and 90% of employees work within 3km of the city centre those are journey distances very easily made by public transport on foot or by bike but at the same time we're in mind the nature of the Dutch planning system that can bring that about which is basically more public sector led than the planning system that we have This important placemaking agenda you know, we've seen Edinburgh the roll-outs the gradual roll-outs across the whole city of area wide 20mph speed limits and I think to a lesser extent in Glasgow as well I'm just wondering to what extent that's kind of factored into your work placemaking and air quality and active travel is that something that's seen as a a significant intervention or we'll get it This is part of a range of tools that we have at our disposal in terms of the transport budget 10% of that now goes towards active travel so that's apart from the cost of implementing the 20 mile on our own but placemaking is critical to this if we create the kind of places that people want to be in they will necessarily be ones which are pedestrian dominated ones which have better air quality ones which encourage people to walk it addresses so many issues it seems to be kind of painfully obvious in a much quoted city they have targets for the amount of time people spend outside and so we're trying to increase that annually just because being outside is a good thing and if you're working on that basis then the world outside will improve in order to meet and help address those targets Craig McLaren and then Emilia Harckham so I'll let you finish, we'll go out I think that's really what I want to say is that it's a coherent approach to placemaking that is part of a broader answer to air quality issues Craig McLaren Planning and placemaking I use the terms interchangeably because I think they are trying to achieve the same objectives and the same outcomes there's a big role for planning on what can be done I think one of the issues is that the impacts will not always be short term with planning they'll be medium to longer term but it can do things, it can arrange towns, cities, settlements and away where you minimise traffic you can create attractive areas for people make them places where people do want to work you can provide infrastructure for them to walk to do things as well I actually chair the national walking strategy delivery forum which is an interesting move into a planner to do that and one of the reasons we've done that is to try and make sure that that whole active travel issue is mainstreamed into the planning processes and thoughts as well things like designing, building and grading places, it's all there in many ways it's been there for a long time and it's always contributed to the air quality agenda now there's been more of a stronger link being articulated about how that's done so the issue for me is not the fact that we can't do it it's the fact that it's the ability to implement it and deliver it and one of the issues we often have is that planners plan and most other people are the people who deliver the plans and there's a need to try and make sure that that gap be at the private sector we should be getting the private sector thinking about their contributions to air pollution be it house builders or developers and people like that as well but we need to try and bridge that that sort of implementation gap I think that's incredibly important and the other important thing, as I've said already is that the fact that planning can often be seen as something that you just have to get through it should be seen as something which is much more than that it should be seen as something that provides a route map for a better place and that will help tackle issues around air pollution, climate change and a host of other issues A lot of mention has been made to active travel in the context of planning and I echo that but it's also important to focus on transport budgets in terms of supporting active travel this year the Scottish Government will spend £150 per head on trunk roads and new motorways and £7 per head on walking infrastructure and I think that that speaks to the reason why we have such low rates of cycling across Scotland and I just want to bring up the example of Seville in Spain where 80 kilometres of cycle lanes were created between 2007 and 2010 they saw a modal share increase from 0.5 per cent to 7 per cent and air pollution levels were slashed in half over a longer period but between 2000 and 2012 so they were illegal and now they're within the legal limits and that in large part was because of the investment in safe cycling infrastructure which enabled people to make that modal shift and it brought about that behaviour change so I think we need proper scrutiny of the Scottish Government's transport budget and how much it's allocating on active travel by Edinburgh Council to invest 10 per cent of the transport budget in cycling Claudia Beamish It's just to in relation to planning just to ask if those who haven't yet commented or indeed those who have in a more broader sense whether the gap between policy and delivery of better air quality how that can be affected by specific actions to bring about a culture change and a more holistic approach and I appreciate that some people have commented on that already but really honing down into what specifics could be done to have a more holistic approach and a culture change Brifwy, in terms of answers anyone? In terms of policies I think we need a strong network of low emission zones across all of Scotland not just one city which supports the transition for buses such that the bus sector can thrive through low emission zones rather than suffer we need to look at re-regulating the buses all together so that passenger use of buses can increase and I think the bus bill should be looked at the one that's going through Westminster we need to invest more in cycling we need to bring about 20mph zones as the default in urban settings and we need to enable councils to introduce workplace parking levies in relation to planning Scottish planning policy at the moment it is slightly weak on air quality it says that air quality should be considered that needs to be strengthened through the planning review as well I would just specifically about the planning I would note that there has been a huge improvement or recognition that planning can do for air quality my own city Glasgow has moved from I don't want to infuriate any planners here but deciding it was a good idea to put a motorway through the city centre to now where we have avenues project taking place where they will be creating avenues which promote sustainable travel cycling and walking public transport at the expense of cars the other thing in relation to planning there is an issue with wood burning in biomass which seems to have been promoted as a greener alternative and it may be that there has been a move towards promoting biomass in areas where it is not suitable we have seen the biggest improvement in air quality within the UK attributable to the burning of coal and solid fuels we may be undoing some of that by promoting wood burning in biomass in our areas Can you quantify the scale of the problem because we try to get a handle on this LER all we know is that it's growing it's difficult to quantify exactly what it is but I mean certainly within London they seem to be noticing that out with times where you have peak traffic movement they can on cold nights notice that there are getting increases in particulates now it's not the same problem here that it is in London at the moment there is no potential for that to get worse and we don't really have I think good enough controls on that at the moment the other thing is just briefly to mention we need further investment in cycling and walking that is the long term answer to pollution within our urban areas there's also a lot of work that we are able to do within the local authority purely because we get ring fence grants from the Scottish Government to enable us to do air quality works and I'm trying to raise the point that that money is appreciated and I would like to see that continue over the longer term Greg McLaren three things just to mention there's a review on the planning system just now as you'll probably know we've been talking about some key principles for the planning system and that which I think would help with this agenda one is that it should be much more front loaded now it's done we should be having the discussions with communities very much earlier in the system in the process than we do just now and that would give us a clearer idea where we want to go on a route map the second thing is this corporate agenda and we're planning fits and corporately in the public sector and I've said earlier there's probably an issue that seems to be it has to have been sidelined and seen as something which is regulatory and that's important but there's a lot more about recognising the benefits of great places things better and the final thing about that is much more collaborative on how we do things and there are lots of different things which affect places which planning is no control over just now no link into we need to make sure that the review of the national transport strategy thinks about this we need to think about things such as city region deals which are the main ways which infrastructure has been funded just now how this is going to fit into this what the connection is to that as well and there are lots of other disciplines strategies and objectives that have an influence on us which we need to look at just to refer back to Claudia's question how do we encourage an integrated approach to this we've heard a lot about the maybe imbalance of funding or the funding being put into things that aren't really encouraging the improvement in air quality in many ways so there should be a shift of funding to walking, cycling, public transport and a more integrated approach to air quality management but if you build into that some conditionality across sectoral way then I think that could also stimulate the integrated approach that you seek okay, thank you can I thank very much to the witnesses for their contribution to this session and the earlier one the committee's next meeting will take place on the 16th of May as agreed earlier we will now move into private session and I ask that the public gallery be cleared as the public part of the meeting is closed thank you