The Big Interview
Air Quality News talks to Baroness Finlay Pippa Neill talks to Baroness Finlay, Crossbench Member of the House of Lords and Chair of the CO Research Trust.
Baroness Finlay is a Welsh Doctor, Professor of Palliative Medicine, a Crossbench Member of the House of Lords and Chair of the CO Research Trust, a charity dedicated to reducing and preventing deaths caused by carbon monoxide (CO). Finlay played an influential role in the Environment Act, where despite rejections from the Commons, the House of Lords were calling for large scale reforms on environmental protection. ‘What I and others were calling for was a clear recognition that air pollution is damaging our health,’ she tells Air Quality News. A key area where Baroness Finlay was calling for change was with the UK’s current monitoring network. ‘Air quality monitoring in the UK is grossly inadequate,’ says Finlay. ‘The problem is, the current system is based on sampling and so it has to be sampling at the right place and at the right time in order to generate an accurate picture of the air quality. ‘Unless you properly monitor air pollution, then you’re not going to know if you’ve got improvements or not.’ Baroness Finlay was also personally calling for schools to monitor and reduce air pollution. ‘It’s particularly concerning that some of the places with the most polluted air are places where children are growing up. We know that atmospheric pollution disproportionately affects children. It affects brain development, mental health and can even affect pregnant women through the placenta to then be handed on to the next generation. 26
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‘At the moment, there is talk about monitoring carbon dioxide in classrooms, but this doesn’t tell you anything about the concentrations of toxic air that is coming through the windows.’ However, like any politician, Baroness Finlay knows that if you want to make changes, you need to know how to pay for them. ‘It would cost money to install new and better monitors and they have to be maintained and the results analysed and financial considerations will always come into play ‘Do you put up tax in one area to pay for it? And if you do, which taxes do you put up? The government has to balance the books at the end of the day.’ But using economic reasons for a lack of inaction on air pollution has been criticised many times over.
"Air quality monitoring in the UK is grossly inadequate," A recent report published by the Clean Air Fund found that reducing pollution to World Health Organisation (WHO) recommended levels could benefit the UK economy by £1.6bn annually by reducing premature deaths, reducing sickness absence and improving productivity at work. However, according to Baroness Finlay, governments are too focused on short-term investments, ‘investing in the future is not something that governments tend to be good at,’ she says. The government has also come under scrutiny for not using the Environment Act to update the legal air quality
