Defra slams Council air pollution plan
A draft action plan to tackle Ashbourne's air pollution, submitted to the Government by Derbyshire Dales District Council, has been rejected. In spite of damning criticism, the Conservative-controlled Council are recommending that the same draft report be approved for public consultation.
Comments from Defra, the government department responsible for ensuring that local authorities do all they can to ensure our air is safe to breathe, include:
"necessary detail is severely lacking" and in reference to figures on sources of pollution "it is currently unclear whether this has been robustly calculated".
Local air quality campaigner Peter Dobbs said, "Allowing such a deeply flawed report to go out to public consultation is a blatantly cynical exercise in 'box-ticking' by the Council. The draft report is fundamentally flawed and needs to be rewritten with the aim of creating a plan that will work: not just something that fits in with the current County Highways agenda. Imagining that the current draft plan could ever achieve the reductions in NOx pollution levels required over the next 5 years is as absurd as believing that the Monty Python parrot could fly by re-arranging its feathers".
All opposition groups on the District Council have united behind a call to include measures in the action plan that will reduce the number of HGVs that travel though Ashbourne. This deficiency in the current plan had also been identified by Defra, who commented "HGVs are listed as the highest contributors, but only one of the measures focusses on HGVs in any way".
A recommendation to approve the draft action plan for public consultation will be debated by the Community and Environment Committee of the District Council on Tuesday 1st November.