Environmentalists sue UK government over air pollution plan News
Environmentalists sue UK government over air pollution plan

Lawyers from ClientEarth [advocacy website] filed [press release] a lawsuit against the UK government on Wednesday stating that the country’s proposed plan for reducing the UK’s air pollution is inadequate. On May 5, the UK Department of Environment Food & Rural Affairs (Defra) [official website] released a draft of the UK Air Quality Plan for tackling nitrogen dioxide [report, PDF], which details steps to be taken to improve the air quality in the UK. ClientEarth alleges that the plan does not incorporate necessary measures to ensure that the air-pollution is brought down to legal levels. ClientEarth has stated [Guardian report] that technical documents show that it is necessary to discourage polluting vehicles from entering cities, but the UK government believes that including charging zones should be a last resort after other methods are exhausted. It is also alleged that this new Air Quality Plan is not sufficient to satisfy a previous court order to produce a new plan, and instead is simply a consultation for a plan.

The UK High Court previously ruled [JURIST report] in favor of ClientEarth in November relating to a previous lawsuit the group filed against the UK government. In that ruling, the court determined that a proposed five-year plan by Defra did not reduce air pollution to legal limits “as soon as possible.” In March 2016 the law firm filed [JURIST report] papers stating that the UK experiences 40,000 early deaths from air pollution every year and that “the government is in breach of a Supreme Court order to clean up air quality, having failed once against to take appropriate action in the face of this public health crisis.” Last year the Supreme Court ordered the government to submit new air quality plans to bring down air pollution. The law firm said [Reuters report] that the first plans were inadequate to decrease nitrogen dioxide emissions.