Environmental Standards Scotland air quality investigation - Scottish Government improvement plan

Local authority roles and responsibilities in relation to air quality

Under the Environment Act 1995 and associated regulations, all local authorities are required to regularly review and assess air quality in their areas against objectives for several pollutants of particular concern for human health, through the Local Air Quality Management (LAQM) system. If this assessment indicates that any objective is not being achieved, the authority concerned must declare an Air Quality Management Area (AQMA) and produce an air quality action plan (AQAP) setting out how it intends to achieve the objectives. Additionally, all authorities are required to submit an annual progress report to the Scottish Government and SEPA summarising their monitoring and other air quality related work over the previous year. The three recommendations made by ESS to strengthen the LAQM process are:

• Introduce the requirement for local authorities to complete and publish AQAPs within a specified target date following the introduction of an AQMA, which must be within as short a time as possible;
• Introduce the requirement for local authorities to achieve AQMA and AQAP objectives within a specified target date, which must be within as short a time as possible; and
• Introduce the requirement for local authorities to review and, where necessary, update AQAPs. The targets for any such review and update must be consistent with the principle of as short a time as possible.

Delivery of these three recommendations will help to improve action plan implementation by setting out a more streamlined and standardised delivery process, whilst at the same time providing greater clarity and guidance to local authorities on their roles and responsibilities.

One of the actions in CAFS2 is to undertake a review of the LAQM system. To support and inform that review, a short life working group was established in October 2022, including officials from the Scottish Government, SEPA and a representative selection of local authorities.

The working group broadly endorsed the responses to the three recommendations set out below, which were then put out to wider consultation via the Scottish Pollution Co-ordinating Control Committee (SPCCC), a forum through which local authorities come together to discuss and exchange view on environmental health matters.^[2] The policy guidance, which the Scottish Government produces to assist authorities in undertaking their LAQM duties (as referred to under recommendation 1 below), will be updated to reflect all of these changes and published by March 2023.

Recommendation 1 - Introduce the requirement for local authorities to complete and publish AQAPs within a specified target date following the declaration of an AQMA, which must be within as short a time as possible.

Scottish Government response – accept recommendation.

The Environment Act 1995, which sets out the requirements for local authority air quality review and assessment, does not prescribe any timescales for preparing an AQAP. However the Scottish Government's LAQM policy guidance, produced to assist local authorities in undertaking their statutory duties, states that AQAPs are expected to be completed within 12 months of an AQMA being designated.

The policy guidance will be updated with a more clearly defined requirement for AQAPs to be published within as short a time as possible and no later than 12 months from AQMA designation.

As internal approval processes vary between local authorities, the shortest possible time to produce and publish an AQAP will be determined on a case by case basis. The policy guidance will set out what a local authority must include in an AQAP as well as the statutory consultation requirements. These factors, alongside a local authority's internal approval process, will be taken into account by SEPA and the Scottish Government in agreeing the shortest possible time to develop and publish plans with individual local authorities.

Recommendation 2 - Introduce the requirement for local authorities to achieve AQMA and AQAP objectives within a specified target date, which must be within as short a time as possible.

Scottish Government response – accept recommendation.

The LAQM policy guidance referred to in the response to recommendation 1 sets out what should be included in an AQAP, including implementation timescales for measures, quantification of expected impacts of measures and assessment of whether measures will be sufficient to meet objectives.

As part of the wider LAQM review referred to under recommendation 1, the short life working group has concluded that the policy guidance should be strengthened to require:

• Specified target dates for completing each action plan measure;
• Well defined milestones towards completion; and
• A clearer requirement for assessing (where feasible, given that some measures will be qualitative by nature) the estimated reduction in pollutant concentrations contributed by each AQAP measure.

The revised policy guidance will also confirm that AQAP measures should be delivered within as short a time as possible, and that the action plan itself should have a timescale for completion and for revocation of the AQMA. The timescale for revocation should be 'within as short a time as possible' which should be taken to mean the date by which the longest term AQAP measure is expected to be completed. This will be agreed with individual local authorities on a case by case basis, taking into account their specific circumstances.

Finally, the revised guidance will include more explicit requirements for joint working with Transport Scotland and SEPA on actions which lie outside direct local authority control, for example where exceedences of objectives relate to the trunk road network or SEPA controlled processes, and with neighbouring authorities on actions which have cross boundary implications. The present guidance simply recommends that such joint working should take place, but the revised guidance will introduce an expectation that this should happen as a matter of course and sets out standardised advice on how it will work in practice.

Recommendation 3 - Introduce the requirement for local authorities to review and, where necessary, update AQAPs. The targets for any such review and update must be consistent with the principle of as short a time as possible.

Scottish Government response – accept recommendation.

The Environment Act 1995 requires action plans to be revised 'from time to time'. The short life working group established to support the wider review of LAQM referred to under previous recommendations has agreed that this requirement should be more clearly defined. Therefore revised LAQM policy guidance will specify that current AQAPs should be reviewed and, where necessary, updated within one year of the revised guidance being published, and every five years subsequently.

It is important to strike a balance between review and implementation. Too short a cycle and efforts will be skewed towards review and updating, rather than taking action, which the Scottish Government does not consider to be most effective use of resources nor conducive to further improving air quality. A five year cycle is considered appropriate as it is consistent with the lifespans of the Government's Cleaner Air for Scotland strategies. At the same time, we would expect many of the measures to be completed within the five year period, and it will be made clear in guidance that timescales for individual measures should be as short as possible. If circumstances change significantly within the AQMA, this will trigger an automatic review of the action plan for appropriateness, to ensure that measures remain sufficient to achieve compliance within as short a time as possible.