Have your say on Brent’s Air Quality Action Plan

Brent's Air Quality Action Plan is now live! Thank you for everyone's contributions.

Read the press release.

Read the Air Quality Action Plan (2023-27).  

Sign up to Brent’s Environmental Network to stay up to date about Brent Council’s work to combat the climate emergency and poor air quality. 

To support this plan, the council is launching its Air Quality Champions programme which aims to recruit community volunteers to raise awareness of pollution and help shape solutions. Apply to become an Air Quality Champion and help the council deliver this important work. 

Dirty air costs lives.

That's why we have made it a priority to work with our residents and businesses, TfL, the Mayor of London and national government to improve air quality across the borough. While great progress has been made in recent years, there is still work to do; and we want to hear your views on what action to take.

We are working to update our Air Quality Action Plan to make sure the action we take over the next five years will have the most impact, where it's needed most.

In 2019, 59% of Brent’s monitoring sites had an annual nitrogen dioxide level higher than the legal limit. When it comes to particulate matter, both our PM2.5 sites and one of the PM10 sites exceeded World Health Organisation limits.

Clearly, more needs to be done. Air pollution is considered the world's largest environmental health threat, with over 4,000 deaths across London attributed to air pollution in 2019.

This is not just an inner London problem – a report by the GLA and Imperial College London shared that the highest number of these deaths were recorded in outer London boroughs.

We want to work with you, our residents, to improve air quality as quickly as possible.

Over the last year, we have worked to review progress made against our current Air Quality Action Plan and have updated it to make sure the actions taken over the next five years (2023-2027) are as ambitious as possible. This supports national and London-wide policies, such as the Ultra Low Emission Zone, to help protect Brent residents from the health impacts of poor air quality.

The review has had the following stages:

1) Developing the draft Air Quality Action Plan:

During the first stage in Brent's review and update of the Air Quality Action Plan, we wanted to hear your views on air quality in your local area and collect your ideas on action we can take to clean up the air we all breathe. To do this, we worked with Kaizen Partnership, a community outreach specialist, to speak with more than 400 people in locations across the borough about air pollution. Kaizen worked to make sure we collected the views of individuals who reflect Brent's diverse community.

Alongside this, residents could help shape Brent’s Air Quality Action Plan by filling in the survey on this platform which was live until midnight 30th November 2021.

The information collated from the survey and community outreach work has been analysed and used, along with with air pollution data, to help us identify themes and priorities to include in the draft Air Quality Action Plan. The findings from the community outreach can be downloaded under "Phase 3".

Meanwhile, we also undertook borough-wide air pollution modelling to better understand the situation in Brent, identifying pollution hotspots and dominant sources for those locations.

2) Feedback on the Draft Air Quality Plan:

The information you shared in the first survey, along with the borough-wide data modelling, fed into the creation of the draft Air Quality Action Plan.

The consultation on this is currently open until Tuesday 2 May.

3) Publishing the Air Quality Action Plan:

Once the plan has gone through that final public consultation, the final plan will be shared in 2023 and delivery of the actions will start.

Thank you for your input!