Executive summary
This final report describes the work under Task 3 Policy analysis of the Neighbourhood Statistics on Ambient Air Quality Contract (RMP/3035). The main objective of the policy analysis is to further the current understanding of air quality impacts on local communities with differing levels of social deprivation.
Environmental inequalities arise where specific communities, such as the most deprived, experience a poorer environmental quality. Understanding and tackling such inequalities is important in the context of sustainable development, where socio-economic issues need to be considered along side environmental ones, and in view of the emerging agenda on social justice in the UK.
To further investigate environmental inequalities associated with air quality, the following analyses were undertaken in this study:
- Comparison of levels of deprivation and air quality concentrations across the UK
- Assessment of changes in trends at different spatial resolutions e.g. at the urban level
- Consideration of whether populations experiencing air pollution higher than the Air Quality Strategy (AQS) objective values tend to be more deprived through assessment of deprivation levels in Air Quality Management Areas (AQMAs)
- Assessment of the potential impact of pollution from large point sources on communities based on their level of deprivation
- Examination of whether pollution levels and associated impacts suffered by the most deprived communities could be compounded by increased susceptibility
The relationship between distribution of pollutant concentrations and areas of social deprivation is complex. It depends on the pollutant in question and differs in different cities and regions of the UK. Consequently it is difficult to draw general conclusions that apply everywhere. There are however a number of important key findings summarised below, which feed into proposed recommendations at the end of this section for further consideration by Defra.
| 
