Scientists Urge UK Air Pollution Inequality Inquiry

There is a fence round every rich man’s lungs, and nobody in England built it on purpose. That is what makes it so hard to see. The modern reformer usually stands before a gate he does not understand and proposes to pull it down. The odd thing about the hundred and fifty scientists, MPs and activists now pressing the government for an inquiry into the unequal health effects of air pollution is that they are doing the reverse. They have found a fence that nobody admits to building, and they are asking, rather impertinently, who put it there.

The strongest reply from Whitehall deserves a hearing, because it is not foolish. Bad air is bad for everybody. Why spend years studying who breathes the worst of it, when the same years could be spent making all of it better? An inquiry, says the practical man, is the place where urgency goes to be minuted. Clean the air, and the poor will breathe it with the rest of us.

This sounds like common sense, and it is only common sense with half its information. Pollution is not distributed like weather. It is distributed like rent. The house beside the dual carriageway is cheap because it sits beside the dual carriageway, and the family in it lives there because the house is cheap. The market has done what it always does, which is to put a price on the very air, so that the poor pay for theirs in coughing because they could not pay for it in pounds. When the Institute for Fiscal Studies finds lower-income and minority-ethnic households carrying a heavier share of the dirt, it has not uncovered an accident. It has uncovered an arrangement.

And arrangements have consequences that a universal remedy does not undo. Charge every old diesel van at the city boundary and you have helped the air, certainly. You have also fined the plumber who lives in the cheap terrace because he could not afford the new van, while the commuter in his electric car glides past him into a cleaner centre. A policy that ignores who lives where will tend to clean the air of the people who were already breathing well. I do not call that a reform. I call it moving the fence a little further down the road and congratulating ourselves on the view.

So the inquiry is not delay. It is the only honest way to find out why the gate stands where it does. Consider the woman in a flat above a bus stop in some northern town, drying her washing on the radiator because the line outside comes in grey. She did not choose the bus stop. Nobody chose it for her. That is precisely the trouble, and precisely why somebody ought now to be made to choose.

The planners who ran the great road past her window never asked who lived on the other side of it. The least they can do is ask now, before they build the next one.