Scientists Urge UK Air Pollution Inequality Inquiry

The matter is this: a hundred and fifty scientists, members of Parliament and campaigners have asked the government to inquire into why the dirtiest air in England settles most thickly on the poorest and on minority-ethnic families. The question is whether any reason given for that arrangement would survive a conversation with someone who owed it nothing.

Begin with the defence, and give it its best form. Air across England has grown cleaner over the years. No minister drew a map and assigned the fumes to particular streets. People live by busy roads because the rents there are lower, and they took those rents freely. An inquiry, on this view, is a costly way of discovering what everyone already knows, and every month spent studying is a month not spent cutting emissions.

That is a fair argument. It fails in the middle.

Consider the cheap rent. The flat above the bus depot is cheaper because the air is foul. The discount is not a bargain. It is a receipt. The tenant has been paid, in a few pounds a month, to breathe on behalf of everyone who drives past and lives somewhere quieter. Nobody signed this contract on purpose. The landlord set a price, the market did its arithmetic, and the lungs of a child in Tower Hamlets or Bradford became the place where a city’s traffic is quietly settled. When the Institute for Fiscal Studies, which is hardly a nest of agitators, finds the burden falling along lines of income and ethnicity, the pattern is no longer a matter of opinion. It is a ledger.

Now the hereditary check. Was this distribution chosen, or inherited? Nobody living chose it. The ring roads were laid out decades ago, the cheap housing grew up beside them because nobody with money wanted to live there, and each generation of poorer families has moved into the same rooms the last one left. The arrangement has a long history and no author. That is how an injustice keeps itself alive. Since no one decided it, no one is asked to defend it.

Here is the plain translation of what the hundred and fifty are proposing. They do not want a study for its own sake. They want somebody to own the decision. An inquiry forces the government to say, in public and in writing, that it knows who breathes the fumes, and then either to justify that or to change it. It is an awkward position for a minister, and that awkwardness is the point. People do not hesitate to look at a problem unless they suspect what they will find.

Picture a woman on the ground floor of a terrace by a trunk road, wiping the black film from her window sill on a Tuesday. She has never been consulted. She has only been charged.

You may judge for yourself whether that is a price or a tax. Then ask who voted for it.