The government has turned down a bid for £1.7 million to spend on cutting dangerously high pollution levels in Brighton and Hove.
The decision was made based on readings taken from an air quality meter in the middle of a park.
Councillor Gill Mitchell, the deputy leader of Brighton and Hove City Council, has written to the city’s three MPs urging them to raise the issue with ministers.
The bid was rejected by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) after it changed the focus from local authority data on air quality to “national” results.
The council monitors air quality in pollution hotspots such as North Street and Western Road but the only Defra monitoring station in the area is in the middle of Preston Park. Perhaps unsurprisingly it shows the council to be “compliant” with air quality standards.
There is another Defra monitoring station in Worthing because Brighton to Littlehampton forms a zone for the purposes of measuring air quality.
Councillor Mitchell said that the £1.7 million joint bid from the council and bus operators would have helped fund clean air technology for 95 buses. This is on top of the 76 buses and 22 taxis already fitted.
She has written to Brighton Kemptown MP Lloyd Russell-Moyle, Brighton Pavilion MP Caroline Lucas and Hove MP Peter Kyle asking the to raise the matter with the government.
In her letter she said: “I would be pleased if you could draw ministers’ attention to these basic problems with the national air quality model that are now potentially excluding Brighton and Hove from accessing funding, not just from Defra but possibly the DfT (Department for Transport) and the Office for Low Emission Vehicles grants to the value of many millions.
“We have improved air quality in the city by making full use of the grants we have received for cleaner vehicles and firmer evidence and have plans to do more.
“According to our monitoring data for North Street and Western Road in Brighton, lower-emission buses have had a sizeable effect over the last five years on the quality of the air that we breathe, bringing us closer to legal limits. But there is a lot more to do.”
Councillor Mitchell believes that a monitoring station in the middle of a park cannot fully represent the air quality throughout the city.
She said: “By only monitoring the results of just these two stations (Preston Park and Worthing), the national assessment is not presenting a representative picture of air quality in the city and classifies us as ‘compliant’ even though we have two established Air Quality Management Areas demonstrating local exceedances.
“Defra is now focusing on its national model and assessment results and not on local evidence provided by local authorities.
“We are fearful that the government has, in effect, dropped the Brighton-Worthing-Littlehampton agglomeration from its National Air Quality Action Plan.”
Why am I not surprised by this?
It’s the same as the “global warming” SCAM where sensors are removed from colder areas and placed in full sun or in local hot spots, specifically to distort the “climate” statistics.
Government doesn’t want the truth. It’s only interested in propping up it’s own propaganda.
I’m sure I’ll be called a “conspiracy theorist” or worse, but who cares? I certainly don’t. The truth is the truth, and it’s there for anyone who cares to look for it.
Who needs facts when you’re sure you’re right eh?
When money is up for grabs to help put up bus fares it’s ok the change the goalposts. If it was a grant for clean air those results would be fine.
The AURN air quality monitoring site located at Preston Park is an urban/rural monitoring site located 190m from the A23 London Road. The sample inlet for the monitoring equipment is located on the roof of the pavilion, certainly higher than head height. Any contributions from vehicles on the A23 monitorined at the Preston park site will have been substantially dispersed over a distance of 190m. It is likely that calibrated data from this site will have been used to calibrate the ADMS model used to proved modelled concentrations on the adjacent road network and across the city. Perhaps the use of low concentration data from this urban/background site as a means to calibrate an air quality model might raise the question of accuracy at higher concentrations.