London breaches annual air pollution limit for 2017 in just five days

London has breached its annual air pollution limits just five days into 2017, a “shameful reminder of the severity of London’s air pollution”, according to campaigners.

By law, hourly levels of toxic nitrogen dioxide must not be more than 200 micrograms per cubic metre more than 18 times in a whole year, but late on Thursday this limit was broken on Brixton Road in Lambeth.

Many other sites across the capital will go on to break the annual limit and Putney High Street exceeded the hourly limit over 1,100 times in 2016. Oxford Street, Kings Road in Chelsea and the Strand are other known pollution hotspots.

NO2 pollution, which is produced largely by diesel vehicles, causes 9,500 early deaths every year in London. Most air quality zones across the country break legal limits and the crisis was called a “public health emergency” by MPs in April. This week scientists said that one in 10 cases of Alzheimer’s in people living near busy roads could be linked to air pollution.

The new mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has pledged new measures and to double funding to £875m over five years to tackle the problem. But the UK government’s plans have twice been ruled illegal in the past two years and it has been sent back to the drawing board to develop a third strategy.

Alan Andrews, a lawyer at ClientEarth – the group that successfully sued the government – said: “This is another shameful reminder of the severity of London’s air pollution and shows why the mayor has rightly made tackling it a top priority. It is absolutely essential that he now delivers on his promises and that the national government back him to the hilt.”

Andrews, who lives in Brixton, said Khan had promised an expanded ultra-low emission zone in 2019, which limits polluting vehicles, and to deploy the cleanest buses on the most polluted roads.

NO2 pollution in London

How UK citites compare on nitrogen dioxide exceedance

“While these are vital steps in the right direction, we can’t wait another three years for action,” he said. “We need immediate action to cut pollution in the short-term and protect Londoners’ health during these pollution spikes.” In December, Khan issued air pollution alerts at bus stops, tube stations and roadsides due to high levels.

A spokesman for the mayor said: “The Brixton Road [breach] underscores why urgent action is needed to improve air quality across London.” He said Khan would shortly be announcing 10 new low emission bus zones, including one for Brixton Road.

“But this is not enough,” said the spokesman. “The government needs to match the Mayor’s commitment to improving air quality as quickly as possible.”

In December, Paris, Madrid, Athens and Mexico City pledged to ban polluting diesel cars from their centres by 2025 and a number of cities outside the UK have already taken action such as banning cars on specific days or making public transport free.

The government must produce a new national plan by April and ClientEarth said this must include clean air zones in many areas to stop the dirtiest diesel cars entering pollution hotspots. ClientEarth also said the “peverse” financial incentives that encourage people to buy diesel cars rather than cleaner ones must be ended.

Both a national network of clean air zones and tax changes were proposed within government as part of its last plan, but were rejected by the Treasury.

This week new data also revealed that modern diesel cars produce 10 times more NO2 pollution than heavy trucks and buses per litre of fuel, which experts say is due to the much tougher testing faced by heavy vehicles.

London breaches annual air pollution limit for 2017 in just five days

Victorian abortion law ‘breaches human rights’

A campaign to push for abortion to be removed from the justice statutes and decriminalised is to be launched this month by the country’s newest political party.

Sophie Walker, leader of the non-partisan Women’s Equality party, said it was time that abortion was made a sexual health and human rights issue, rather than left languishing under “Victorian criminal law”, where a life prison sentence still exists for procuring a termination. This is a flagship policy for the party, which will hold its first conference in Manchester next weekend. It hopes that with pressure from its supporters, other political parties will take up the issue.

The current legislation governing abortion is the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act, which came into force decades before women had the vote.

Abortion is part of life in mainland Britain: one in three women will have an abortion before the age of 45, with the highest rate among 21-year-olds. Rates have remained fairly constant over the past few years, higher in England and Wales than in Scotland, with 197,906 Britons and 5,190 non-British residents having an abortion last year. About 98% are NHS-funded and the vast majority, 80%, carried out at less than 10 weeks pregnant.

Under the 1861 act, and as amended by the Abortion Act 1967, abortion remains a criminal offence; only cases that meet certain caveats are exempt from prosecution. Two doctors must sign to confirm that a woman’s or her unborn child’s health and welfare is at risk, resulting, say campaigners, in the law simply being circumvented in many cases. And it is also open to political interference. The British Pregnancy Advisory Service believes the rules work only because health professionals work around them.

The WE party has grown to more than 65,000 members and 65 regional groups since its inception last year. It fielded its first political candidates at local and regional elections this year, including for the London mayor.

“This is really about making it very clear that women’s healthcare rights are human rights,” said Walker. “That is why we want to debate this motion at our first conference and to put a focus on prioritising and funding sexual health and wellbeing. If you are denied control over your own body then you are denied so many other controls over your life. Any denial of reproductive rights is a form of violence against women, and the massive funding cuts ongoing in the UK are part of a real trend that is de-prioritising equality.”

Former Progressive Unionist party leader Dawn Purvis is on the advisory board of Marie Stopes International, which provides contraception and safe abortion services. She is to give a keynote speech at the WE party conference on the position in Northern Ireland, where several prosecutions are under way of women who have used the so-called “abortion pill”.

“The situation in Northern Ireland is different to mainland Britain in that, basically, a woman has to be about to die before she is allowed a termination,” Purvis said. “Rape or incest or foetal abnormality are not circumstances under which an abortion will be allowed. We’re seeing women being prosecuted and convicted as criminals – one was reported by her GP after she had gone to him for help, another is a woman being prosecuted for helping her daughter.

“But thankfully we are seeing more and more legal challenges – late last year we had a ruling that the stance of the Ministry of Justice was incompatible with international standards on human rights.”

Diana Johnson, Labour MP for Kingston upon Hull North, has tabled a 10-minute bill for the spring when she will also raise the issue of decriminalising abortion. She does not want to change time limits but wants medical procedures to be governed by clinicians, rather than the criminal law.

“That any woman procuring an abortion is potentially facing a prison sentence of life under legislation dating from 1861 is patently something that needs looking at carefully,” she said. “Decriminalising abortion, for both health professionals and for women, would put the issue with clinicians and health experts, where it belongs.”

Victorian abortion law ‘breaches human rights’