16
Examination of witnesses
Dr Bill Parish, Phil Earl and Erin Cowburn.
Q128 The Chair: I welcome our witnesses to the committee’s 12th evidence session for its inquiry into the effects of artificial light and noise on human health. We have three witnesses from three different departments: Erin Cowburn from the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities; Phil Earl from the Department for Transport; and Bill Parish from Defra. The session is being broadcast live on parliamentlive.tv and a full transcript will be made available to you, the witnesses, shortly after the meeting in case you wish to make any minor editorial corrections. We might ask you at some point also to follow up in writing with points that we are unable to discuss in sufficient detail.
I hope you are all set to answer our questions. I will kick off with a fairly general question that is mainly for Bill Parish, but the others should feel free to chip in, about the different government bodies and departments involved in policy on light and noise pollution. It is spread among different departments, although Defra has the lead. How do the current arrangements allow Defra to fulfil its role as the lead on noise and light policy and co-ordinate efforts across government departments? Do the intersections between the different departments work well? Could you also tell us what Defra is doing in work to monitor noise and light pollution? We heard about this in the previous session.
Dr Bill Parish: Defra works with at least 10 different government departments. We generally work on a bilateral basis with many of them. Because noise and light are from lots of specific sources, our discussions tend to be quite source specific. We have a lot of engagement with road, rail and aviation teams in DfT, with colleagues from the department for levelling up on planning policy, and with our colleagues in the UK Health Security Agency, because they are our main contact with respect to all the health evidence for both types of pollutants. We also work more at the coalface with the agencies with specific responsibilities for the transport networks. We work closely with National Highways on road investment strategy workshops, with the Civil Aviation Authority on airport noise action plans, and with the Rail Safety and Standards Board.
Our time is spent engaging with many partners across government or in the delivery agencies, but we admittedly do not have a central gathering point, except in the case of the Intergovernmental Group on Costs and Benefits, which is all-inclusive, including all the organisations that I spoke of, the devolved Administrations and the Treasury. When we assess the evidence of harms to health and how we will update our Green Book on damage costs for those pollutants, that forum is all-encompassing and very inclusive. When we look at the detail we tend to break off into sub-working groups, because we are focusing on specific sources, such as rail noise or road noise.
Q129 The Chair: Can you tell us a bit about monitoring noise and light pollution? Do we know, for example, how many people are exposed to levels of noise pollution above the 2018 WHO guidelines?
Dr Bill Parish: In the case of noise, our current state of knowledge is that we probably do not have an accurate estimated or modelled assessment of how many people are consistently exposed to levels above the current WHO guidelines. We have made estimates for road and rail in our guidance for those particular sectors, but they are only for road and rail. A very rough estimate in our published guidance in 2019, if you added up roads in agglomerations, roads outside agglomerations and rail, was that it probably adds up to about 12 million people being exposed to a level above 50 decibels, if you use the indicator for noise, which encompasses a 24-hour average for day, evening and night.
One of our major priorities is investing in a new noise modelling system. Since 2020, we have invested about £6 million in a new modelling system for generating noise maps. In the past, we have produced noise maps in a number of phases, but in 2020 we decided to invest in a much more sophisticated modelling system that will help us to visualise noise exposure on all roads, not just major roads, and rail networks, which takes into account topography—where roads go through different sorts of environments where the noise will change.
The new noise modelling system will generate updated noise maps by the end of summer this year, but the important point about the capability that we have invested in is that it will enable us to overlay those maps with population density maps and to accumulate more data to take into account point sources, such as industrial sites, which might be particularly noisy. When that work is finished, towards the end of this year, that will give us the capability to get a much better understanding about national population exposure to noise at different levels, and for us to model proactively the impact of interventions, such as reducing speed limits, to see what that might look like in changing national exposure.
The Chair: Thank you. That is very helpful. On one little detail in your response, I think you said that the variable that you measure is the total noise envelope over a 24-hour period. You heard me ask Dr Fenech in the previous session about intermittency. I can imagine a situation in which it was relatively quiet for 23 hours of the day and for one hour in the middle of the night there was an intense loud noise. Surely that could have different health implications while being perhaps even below an average of 50 decibels over the whole 24 hours. Are you taking into account this question of peaks and intermittency?
Dr Bill Parish: We will need to develop how we apply a more sophisticated approach to those scenarios. We wrestle with this with air quality, for example, where you will get spikes in a period, depending on the source, but the average over a 24-hour period might be a lot lower.
The Chair: So the answer is no, we have not figured out how to deal with it. Thank you.
Baroness Northover: We heard Dr Fenech say, and you will have too, that one reason why we have the evidence on noise is the mapping directive from the EU. You were saying that we have now moved to a different modelling system. Have we lost anything by moving to that system and away from the mapping system that was there before?
Dr Bill Parish: Our new mapping system goes much further than the requirements of the current directive, because our noise maps will include noise mapping for lots of smaller roads, not just the major roads. So it will be a lot more expansive in the amount of information and the breadth of coverage compared with the requirements of the current directive.
The Chair: Thank you. I should just explain that, in about 15 minutes, a number of members of the committee have to leave. It is no reflection on the evidence that you are giving us. It is simply that the King is going to say something to parliamentarians in Westminster Hall, and a number of members of this committee want to hear him. I apologise on their behalf when they leave, probably at around quarter to. Nevertheless, I move on to Lord Rees, who is joining us remotely from his lair in Cambridge.
Q130 Lord Rees of Ludlow: I am sorry to be speaking remotely. I want to ask about the enforcement of regulations, which is a matter, I guess, for local authorities. How well connected are local authorities to central government and its policies? Take something like the noise policy statement for England: how consistent is the application of that sort of regulation and other similar ones across the different regions? I guess this is a question for Erin Cowburn first.
Erin Cowburn: I can answer that in relation to the planning system, but I do not know whether Bill Parish wants to come in on the noise evidence. Local authorities use a range of evidence when it comes to noise and light pollution. Where there is a planning breach in relation to noise and light, they can take enforcement action. We in DLUHC set the overall planning policy framework and planning policy guidance, but it is key that local authorities use circumstances specific to their local areas, so we would expect the framework and guidance to be applied in a way that is consistent with their local areas.
Lord Rees of Ludlow: How do you check that that is happening?
Erin Cowburn: It is not something that we actively monitor.
Lord Rees of Ludlow: I see.
Dr Bill Parish: To add to that, we have to accept that local authorities have to make quite specific decisions at a local level that will be guided by their local circumstances and, to a certain extent, by the way the local community reacts to a consultation. So there is no one-size-fits-all approach for many of the solutions; often, different solutions need to be applied by the local authority, depending on the particular circumstances. We get post from individuals who do not feel that it has worked in their favour, but we have to give local authorities the space to make those decisions based on the local democratic discussions that took place. It is a matter of understanding and keeping up to date with the challenges that local authorities have on a day-to-day basis and the solutions that they have to hand for noise and light.
Lord Rees of Ludlow: So there are no specific recommendations that you think our committee should aim to make on that issue.
Dr Bill Parish: First, we need to be careful about being overly prescriptive. We need to carry on developing our guidance and enhancing it in the light of experience. We need to be careful about how prescriptive we are in guiding local authorities on the way they apply solutions. I would suggest that some local authorities have probably implemented quite brave and innovative solutions for particular circumstances. What works really well is when that experience is shared across the local authority community.
Lord Rees of Ludlow: I know there is some concern about exemptions made for light pollution in some areas, but I think one of my colleagues wants to expand the question on that.
Q131 Baroness Northover: Yes. I want to follow up on two things. You have rather answered the question about whether planning guidance is being consistently applied across different developments, because you have talked about the variability and lack of monitoring there. It has been pointed out to us that the statutory nuisance regulations surrounding light pollution have a long list of exemptions, including major transport hubs. Is appropriate guidance in place to ensure that any disturbances are minimised? We have heard about all these exemptions, such as for railways and so on, and the suggestion that that is an area where we might recommend change.
Dr Bill Parish: Those exemptions are in place because installations such as transport hubs, lighthouses, prisons, bus stations need to be adequately lit. Although that list remains valid, we are not in a position to offer detailed guidance on how, in making sure that those installations are adequately lit, you can prevent excess light spilling over where they are close to where people live.
Baroness Northover: You do not think you are in a position to do that. We have certainly heard it argued that this could be addressed, that you obviously have to balance the need for those areas to be lit, but they should not be exempt and there should be ways in which this issue can be mitigated.
Dr Bill Parish: Again, there are opportunities, on a case-by-case basis, for minimising the light experienced by people living in the vicinity. However, it needs expert input to ensure that premises are still adequately lit and that the lighting is functional and serves its purpose. There are probably solutions, but it requires careful case-by-case consideration, including site inspections by people who have expertise in this area and are able to offer installation advice on the best way to invest in making improvements.
Baroness Northover: Obviously, as part of the Civil Service, you are implementing policy as opposed to making it, but it is very useful to have your perceptions on how it is working.
Dr Bill Parish: Thank you. How it is working? Again, local authorities have done very innovative things in many cases, and in other cases they are genuinely stuck. This is about how to facilitate the sharing of experience where those trailblazers can provide advice on how they found a solution.
Q132 Viscount Hanworth: I want to ask Erin Cowburn something about her engagement with these issues. When it comes to planning permissions and the National Planning Policy Framework, can you take us through the various stages of the process as regards noise pollution and light pollution? In particular, what sort of access do you have to expert opinion? Is that opinion consistent and easily incorporated, or is it problematic?
Erin Cowburn: I will start with the planning process. You mentioned the NPPF, the National Planning Policy Framework. That is set by central government, outlines the framework for planning policy and is underpinned by the planning practice guidance. There is a range of documents that set out how the policy should be applied, and there is one for noise and one for light.
There are two key parts of the planning process where the guidance documents and the policy are taken into account, and that is through plan-making and decision-making. The plan-making process is where a local authority will allocate sites in its area for housing or other development and will use those documents and a range of other guidance and, as I previously mentioned, its local circumstances to determine where those sites should be.
In decision-making—that is, local authorities taking decisions on individual planning permissions—again, they will use that guidance. An applicant will provide evidence when applying for permission and will be expected to provide information on how noise and light will affect the development.
Finally, when the Planning Inspectorate is making decisions on appeals, it will also reference that guidance and documentation. However, I stress that our guidance and policy is only one part of the picture, and we would expect local authorities to consult a range of other guidance and to use their local circumstances.
Viscount Hanworth: Do you mean various bodies like the Institution of Lighting Professionals and the Society for Light and Lighting, which have issued guidelines of their own? Have they influenced you? If so, to what extent?
Erin Cowburn: Not personally—I am fairly new in the role—but we develop our policies and guidance in conjunction with a range of other people, including the departments represented here today, other government departments and a range of external stakeholders. In our planning practice guidance, we also point local authorities to a range of other documentation that they may wish to use—from, for example, the Civil Aviation Authority or the Bat Conservation Trust—although it does not currently point to those particular documents.
Viscount Hanworth: I have a slight sense that people like the Institution of Lighting Professionals do not feel that they are really taken on board. Is that fair aspersion or not?
Erin Cowburn: I could not comment on those individuals, but we are conducting a review of our National Planning Policy Framework later this year, and we will welcome evidence from a range of stakeholders.
Viscount Hanworth: Okay, so you will listen to them.
Erin Cowburn: If they have something to tell us, we will certainly listen.
Q133 The Chair: The next question is addressed to Phil Earl. Given that the vast majority of noise pollution—we are talking about noise for the moment—arises from rail, road or air, what are the relevant standards in place for vehicles as they relate to noise pollution?
Phil Earl: My role in the department is focused on road vehicles. All transport modes follow a broadly similar approach to standards for vehicles. We do not have all morning and all day when we could talk for a very long time about this, but the general premise is that vehicles have to comply with technical standards, which tend to have been improved incrementally over time with respect to the noise levels that can be emitted by different types of vehicles. In the road vehicle space, this is governed by the system of type approval. The regulations that apply are drawn from UNECE’s international regulations, which members of my team participate in the negotiation and agreement of.
In the aviation space it is referred to as noise at source, and it is based on Annexe 16 to Volume I of the Convention on International Civil Aviation, the Chicago convention, whereas in rail we have a series of national technical specification notices and national technical rules that set the various technical requirements that apply to new vehicles. In all cases, effectively those standards have to be complied with before, in the road case, a vehicle can be registered and placed on the market, so we have the Vehicle Certification Agency, which provides certification for those vehicles before they can be sold.
The Chair: I can see that with private cars the turnover is quite rapid. I do not know what the lifespan of a car is, but basically there are very few cars that are, let us say, more than 20 years old on the road. So you can make a technical specification for noise for new vehicles, and if you tighten the screw that comes into effect fairly quickly. But when you look at other modes of transport, particularly rail, where many of the vehicles have been around for several decades, maybe for 40 years, is rail slower to catch up or can you retrospectively say to a train operating company or other people in the rail industry, “Your trains are now out of date and you can no longer use them”?
Phil Earl: As I say, my expertise is not in rail or aviation, but my understanding is that the standards apply only when the vehicles are new, so if we want new vehicles we need to encourage more new vehicles into the system. I will not go out of my area of expertise here, but I expect that it comes down to decisions on contracting and the use of particular types of rolling stock in the rail industry. It is probably a reasonable assertion that the lifetime of a train is longer than the lifetime of a privately owned road vehicle, so you can draw your own conclusions from that.
The Chair: I know it is not your area of expertise, but perhaps you could consult your colleagues and drop us a note to say what happens in rail, which we have mentioned. The same may be true to some extent in the aviation sector, where the turnover of the fleet is much slower. When there are old planes or old rolling stock that no longer comply with current estimates of the risk and the guidelines, what happens? Are operators allowed to carry on using those items, even though they are inappropriate?
Phil Earl: Let me take that away and we will come back to you in writing.
Q134 The Chair: Moving on, we have heard about various interventions in the transport system, other than the vehicles themselves, that could reduce noise, particularly in relation to road noise, which is your area of expertise. We have heard that road surfaces or tyres can also be a way of reducing noise. What is the department’s policy on them? Who decides whether quiet whisper tarmac, or whatever you want to call it, or porous asphalt, is used to resurface a road? Is that the department’s guidance or is it entirely up to the local authority or National Highways? Who is responsible?
Phil Earl: I will start with tyres, because that is closer to the area I am responsible for. This also exposes the degree to which there are different modal approaches with a degree of consistency between them. The rolling noise level of new tyres is also regulated through type approval. There are standards for them in the UNECE as well—Regulation 117, if anyone wants to look it. The regulations are all publicly available and can be looked at. Tyre manufacturers are required to demonstrate that their tyres meet those requirements. As ever, there are trade-offs. As you heard in the previous session, there are always trade-offs, and there are trade-offs here between the noise emitted by a tyre and the safety of the tyre in keeping your vehicle gripping the road.
As well as those regulations, it is worth noting that there are tyre labelling regulations in place, and manufacturers are required to provide a label on a tyre at the point of sale which tells you about the noise level emitted by that tyre, so there is also an element of consumer choice over and above baseline-setting regulation.
On road surfaces—I am sure you have heard this in other sessions—the strategic network is managed by National Highways, which tells me that it generally uses low-noise surfacing for new or replacement road surfaces unless there is a good safety or engineering reason not to. So certainly where it is building new roads or replacing roads, that is what it uses. However, as you heard previously, it is taking forward a programme of other measures that can complement or be used instead of low-noise surfacing, such as noise insulation packages, noise barriers, and those sorts of things.
On local roads, that is within the gift of local authorities, and we are back into the space of sharing good practice where it exists but also taking into account the many trade-offs that local authorities are having to deal with.
The Chair: So there is no policy from DfT to encourage or incentivise local authorities to use quiet road surfaces.
Phil Earl: No, there is not.
Q135 The Chair: You have already said that rail is not your area of expertise, so you may wish to write in on this one. What about the standards in relation to rail, including things like high-pitched screeches as trains come to a halt, which can be very penetrating and unpleasant, and equally, I guess, the very loud noise that heavy diesel engines create when they are accelerating, often in urban areas because they are accelerating away from the station, so the peak noise is very much higher than the average?
There is also something about speed limits. We have been told in relation to road transport that introducing speed limits is a good way of reducing noise. Is the same true in relation to rail, and is anything being done about it?
Phil Earl: Thank you for those questions. As a whole, the requirements certainly for vehicles on the railway—the trains—are, again, down to the system of national technical specification notices and national technical rules. There is nothing specific in there that relates to the noise from brakes. I am told by my colleagues in rail that that is a result of the application of the mechanical friction brake system, and there will be various specifications that relate to those, but they are not specifically focused on the noise emitted by them, which may be the consequence of the types of materials used.
On the rail system as a whole and the potential use of speed limits, we come back to the previous responses about the use of noise mapping and using those maps to identify potential hotspots on the rail system and the mitigations that might be taken forward to respond to them.
Q136 Lord Winston: I will ask briefly about Tube trains. I have been on the Central line, the Northern line and the Jubilee line in the last few days, where I have measured the number of decibels and the pain level between many stations, not just one or two. Around Euston, for example, it is terrifying. I suspect that the wheels do not fit the rails. What is being done about that? It seems to be partly wear and tear. Some of it is old rolling stock, but some of it really is not; the Jubilee line is not that old.
Phil Earl: I can certainly empathise with that, having been on the Tube at the weekend. My son put his ear defenders on because it was so loud. You will have to speak to Transport for London, which manages the Tube network. I can endeavour to link you up directly or ask them the question, whichever is most helpful for the committee.
The Chair: It would be useful if you could tell us who to ask. We could ask them to submit written evidence.
Phil Earl: I will find out who you need to speak to.
The Chair: We are giving you a long list of homework. I apologies for that.
Q137 Viscount Hanworth: I wonder whether this is a fair question for Phil Earl. The volume of civil aviation has increased markedly over time—since the 1960s, for example—and, at the same time, individual aircraft have become much quieter, with bypass jets and so on. Have the regulations changed to accommodate these substantial differences between then and now?
Phil Earl: Are you referring to the regulations on—
Viscount Hanworth: On aircraft noise, flight paths and whatever is done to mitigate the aircraft noise. Can you tell us how the regulations have evolved, if indeed they have?
Phil Earl: Again, this is slightly outside my area of expertise, but the overall approach to aircraft noise is managed through the international approach, which is based on what they call a balanced approach, which looks at different forms of mitigating the noise. One is noise at source, as I mentioned earlier, which is about the reduction in the noise of the vehicles, if that is the correct terminology. As you say, they are tending to get quieter over time, notwithstanding the point about how long an old plane may continue to be flown, but that is complemented by measures around the airports themselves and the flight paths.
In order to give you a full, detailed answer to this question, it might be another one that it would be helpful to take away so that I can provide you something in writing, written by someone who works day in, day out in the aviation sector.
Viscount Hanworth: Am I right in presuming that this is a matter of international regulation, rather than national regulation?
Phil Earl: The Civil Aviation Authority delivers a lot of this on the ground, together with the broader regulatory environment, which is led by Defra and others. It is a complex map. The international approach in particular is the one that governs the vehicle noise itself. Again, I will not pretend to have a full grip on this, so it is better if I take it away and come back to you with a fuller written answer.
Viscount Hanworth: It would be informative to hear a fuller story.
Q138 The Chair: I do not want to be unfair, but one of the things that is coming across to us is that, for a number of responses, you are saying, “This is not DfT’s responsibility. It’s either for Transport for London or for local authorities”. But somebody, maybe Defra, must be setting the policy framework. Local authorities do what they can with their limited budgets; they have various competing demands. But someone must be saying, either in guidance or regulation, “This is an acceptable way to service roads”, or not: maybe they do not, and it is a free-for-all. It is the same with TfL. It will say, “Our job is to keep the Underground running, but it’s somebody else’s job to tell us what the constraints are on that”.
Which department or policy area owns the policy for the groups that have operational responsibility for exposing us to noise and light pollution in particular? Where does responsibility lie?
Dr Bill Parish: Responsibility for the overarching policy on achieving the outcome sits with Defra. Noise mapping is a key tool to identify areas where the noise exposure is greatest on rail or road networks. However, when it comes to the solutions, depending on the type of transport, we need to work very closely with DfT on either vehicle standards or road surfaces. When it comes to constructing the road, it takes a conversation with the experts about which solution for the road surface does not compromise safety, traction and everything else. It becomes a technical discussion where we have to work very closely with National Highways and DfT. If a different surface would be quieter, that is part of the solution, but we very much have to work together on the technical specifications of how you make that road surface quieter and ensure that the road is still safe to drive on.
The Chair: I am still finding a tendency for things to slip through my fingers, so I will play that back to you. You, Defra, are doing a new map that will tell us how many millions of people are exposed to noise—we are talking about noise at the moment, but we could do the same for light—that is above an acceptable risk level. You say to other departments, “This is the problem. What’s your solution?”, and they, whether it is DfT or DLUHC, say, “Actually, it’s not our baby. It’s the local authorities’ or TfT’s”, or, “We accept your point, but there’s old rolling stock on the trains and we can’t do anything about it, because the rolling stock companies can’t afford to replace them”. So we get stuck. You have evidence that things are not right, but you do not have the policy levers to make things better. Am I being harsh and unfair here?
Dr Bill Parish: We spend quite a lot of our time engaging with the specific groups, such as the Rail Safety and Standards Board. If they are setting standards, we are bringing the noise issue to the table, but we do not hold the technical solutions; we are looking to the engineers and specialists to find solutions to the problem that we are putting on the table when we say, “Noise exposure is above a certain level. We need to find a solution to this”. On making sure that people do it, we need to go away and think about whether our level of leverage could be greater.
Q139 The Chair: If you have any further thoughts, please let us know. Before I move to Baroness Neuberger, who will pick up the expertise theme, I want to ask Phil one final question. I have asked about road surfaces and trains. Now I want to be even more annoying by asking you about new forms of transport, such as drones. What effect will they have on noise pollution, and what is going on at DfT to consider that and address the possible health issues that might arise?
Phil Earl: Obviously, there are various new forms of transport that potentially pose new challenges. On drones specifically, the department has commissioned the Civil Aviation Authority’s environmental research and consultancy department to publish some specific research on the effects of drone aircraft noise, effectively, although it has a longer title than that. That research was published in March 2023. Again, it is publicly available. If the committee has not seen that, I am sure I can provide a suitable web link so that you can look for yourselves.
On the broader question of new forms of transport, you will also be aware of electric vehicles. In that space, we are actually asking for them to make a noise. This is where you get into some interesting trade-offs about the impact of very quiet vehicles, which may have an unintended consequence for vulnerable road users, particularly the blind, the partially sighted or the elderly.
Recently introduced regulations—again this is being done at the international level—say that if an electric vehicle is travelling below, I think, 20 kilometres per hour or reversing, it must emit a noise. There is then a new set of questions and challenges around getting the balance right between using noise to warn people and make them aware of the vehicle against the increased annoyance or negative consequences of more noise in the soundscape, as was mentioned earlier.
Viscount Hanworth: Did you say 20 miles per hour?
Phil Earl: Let me double check my notes. It is 20 kilometres per hour, or about 12 miles per hour.
Viscount Hanworth: So above 20 kilometres per hour there is no noise.
Phil Earl: Above that the noise from the tyres will compensate for the lack of engine noise. That is roughly where the switchover point is.
Viscount Hanworth: That is a surprise. It seems to be a very low threshold.
Q140 Baroness Neuberger: Some of this question follows on from that. We have heard, including in the previous session, that evidence about the effects of noise and light on human health is evolving and growing. We know more and more about it. That perhaps ought to lead to some further guidelines. How well are Defra and, indeed, other departments able to keep on top of this evolving research? What resources do you have to draw on? Presumably, that will affect your work.
Dr Bill Parish: We work very closely with colleagues from the UK Health Security Agency on a day-to-day basis. We also fund our own research. In the last financial year, we spent nearly £200,000 on seven new projects to understand various aspects of noise pollution better, including health and exploring policy options such as green infrastructure. A further two are about to be commissioned; in particular, a fairly big study on stroke and diabetes meta-analysis to inform our costs and benefits work.
We keep close contact with the research community more broadly. I have an acoustics expert in the team who is very well networked with the broader noise specialist community. We have a modest budget with which to fund our own research to complement the work that the UK Health Security Agency is doing.
Our biggest evidence tool will be the noise mapping or modelling system that will be completed towards the end of this year. It will be a game-changer in our ability to visualise and get a better grip on population exposure. With a better grip on this and more updated understanding of the health impacts on people, we will be able to get a better idea of the health burden at a national level. That will lead to us being able to know what we need to step up in our policy interventions—where we should be targeting them and how. That £6 million investment will be critical in the way we shape our policy from this year on.
Baroness Neuberger: Assuming that it shows quite a lot of evidence that noise in particular is having a powerful effect on the nation’s health, or on some people’s within the nation, is that the threshold where we need to see policy changes? If so, what mechanisms would trigger a review of policy? Can you trigger a review of policy yourself, for instance?
Dr Bill Parish: On our assessment of the health burden of noise, we need to be careful that we are looking at just noise or light in isolation. One reason why noise and light pollution have been brought into my air quality team is that many sources of noise are also sources of pollution. The communities that might be disproportionately exposed to air pollution might have bigger health inequalities, and these environmental impacts might be contributing to those. We need to look slightly more holistically at the contribution of different burdens all adding up.
If the evidence is suggesting that the burden is much higher, Ministers will then need to consider our options on the next step in enhancing our policy approach.
Baroness Neuberger: That is really helpful. You just spoke about a stroke and diabetes meta-analysis. Obviously, that has only just been commissioned. It will be very interesting to see the specifics of that, if you could let us have those.
Dr Bill Parish: When the contract is let, we can give you full details.
Baroness Neuberger: Thank you very much.
Erin Cowburn: Our main opportunity to engage with the evidence from a planning perspective is when we make regular updates to our National Planning Policy Framework and our planning practice guidance. As I mentioned earlier, another one of those is coming up later this year. We will definitely be engaging with Defra and tapping into its evidence.
Baroness Neuberger: You were very careful in how you responded to that—and rightly cautious, obviously. But what would trigger you thinking differently about it? We are interested in where the evidence has to get to and how strong it has to be. I realise that there is a lot of contributory stuff and disaggregating it is difficult, but where does it have to get to for you as civil servants to say, “We’ve got to do something about this”?
Erin Cowburn: Our policy framework contains a large number of policies. We recently consulted on an update to the NPPF with a particular focus on housing. That was due to engagement with a wide range of stakeholders on the housing issue. We felt that it was the time to do that. Our Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill is going through the Lords, as I am sure you are aware, so that is the driver in the case of the wider review later this year.
Phil Earl: To complement that, we obviously lean heavily on Defra and UK HSA for the evidence on the overall health effects which they are feeding through to us. The department is doing research in specific modal areas, because we are best placed to do that. We have commissioned the Civil Aviation Authority’s department to produce biannual reports on developments in the evidence base on aviation noise and health. It is a big deal, and we are currently sponsoring two major studies on the links between aviation noise and health. From memory, one is an overall study and the other is looking particularly at sleep disturbance. There is an active programme going on there.
In my own area, the research we have is focused more on the implementation of measures. You may have heard of some of the work we have been doing on trialling—this goes back to the question of local authorities, to some degree—on noise cameras, which are like speed cameras but for noise. They will hopefully enable local authorities to better target their enforcement and more effectively. A series of trials finished in February, so we are looking at next steps in those sorts of areas. Our research tends to be more modally focused, drawing on the broader work done by others.
Q141 Baroness Neuberger: One point raised by witnesses in this inquiry is that noise and light pollution are not regulated in the same way as other pollutants. That is presumably, Dr Parish, why you have them coming into your area. They were mentioned briefly in the 25-year environment plan, but not in the follow-up environmental improvement plan. Do you think that the current regime of treating light and noise pollution separately is either appropriate or effective?
Dr Bill Parish: Noise was explicitly mentioned in the 25-year plan. It was not in the EIP, but that is more of an update to an existing 25-year plan, so I do not take it as a signal that the Government have deprioritised noise to the point that it has fallen off. The EIP set out a lot of new policy commitments across many environmental pressures. We have also set a lot of new targets under the Environment Act. So, first, the real evidence of us continuing to care about noise is the investment we are making in the mapping, because it is critical to underpinning all the work we are doing to understand impacts better and to the need for us to work closely with partners to ensure that we update the costs. If we have a better handle on health burdens and the costs to society, that helps to make a more compelling case for making the big investments needed for the solutions.
We have shied away from setting specific targets in legislation for noise. The discussion we had earlier about the way we describe decibel levels—whether it is day, evening or night, how you weight those, and how you deal with spikes, et cetera—means that it is difficult to set a meaningful target about what we should be aiming for. The issue may not be just the decibels; it may well be about the tone and frequency, and everything else. It starts to be very difficult to implement a policy if we are getting confused about many different contributing factors.
For the time being, we need to absorb what the new noise maps are telling us and focus on the costs and benefits to inform us on how we adjust. Do we need to change in policy or are there bits of existing policy that we could be implementing better, either at national or local level, and how do we target those? It is still a work in progress, but by the end of this year I think we will have more confidence in our evidence base about where to target our resources.
Baroness Neuberger: It does not worry you that it is not under the aegis of the OEP at the moment.
Dr Bill Parish: No, it does not, because we are focusing our energies on the right outcomes: fundamentally, understanding the burden better. When we have a much better understanding of that, we can then consider what the next steps are. We may well bring noise back into the EIP in five years’ time with more specific commitments, once we have worked through the evidence about what we actually need to do to build on the framework we have now.
Baroness Neuberger: So you do not think it is falling through the cracks, basically.
Dr Bill Parish: It is definitely not falling through the cracks as far as government are concerned. Again, the proof of that will be what we are publishing later in the year.
One of the struggles we have at the moment is that we, with our colleagues from the UK Health Security Agency, are making the best that we can of the available evidence. Lots of evidence is being published across Europe, and more widely internationally, and we are reviewing that systematically to help to pin down our understanding of the costs and benefits. Previous evidence has stressed the importance of taking a much more multidisciplinary approach to this. It is far more than physics and engineering; it is really about its social and behavioural aspects, and getting under the skin of what drives issues like annoyance. I think John Stewart used an example in his evidence of how people living under a flight path may well have become acclimatised to that background level of noise, but that is having a significant impact on someone living 18 miles away.
When it comes to the funding of research, noise and light tend to fall between some cracks. We have the Medical Research Council looking at the health bits, then other research councils disaggregating the problem. Actually, we need to take a much more multidisciplinary approach to bring these disciplines together and consider how future research is funded more fundamentally.
Baroness Neuberger: Does that sit with you?
Dr Bill Parish: It sits with research councils—UKRI—but we need to influence that discussion, in the same way as we influenced how strategic priority funding was directed for the air quality grants.
Baroness Neuberger: Essentially, someone has to do the knitting, so you are going to have push quite hard.
Dr Bill Parish: Yes.
Baroness Neuberger: Is that true of the other two of you as well?
Erin Cowburn: Doing the knitting?
Baroness Neuberger: Someone will have to knit the evidence together and push quite hard, because this needs to be taken more seriously. I keep hearing—we have heard—that the real problem is that it is all sitting in lots of different bits. So which bit of government pushes hard to try to pull it together and say, “We have to take it seriously and we know there are lots of different bits”, and that it is not just about physics and engineering? The bit we cannot get our heads around is where the responsibility for pulling it all together sits.
Dr Bill Parish: This simple answer is that a lot of the central role currently sits with Defra, but we are leading on policy for an environmental risk to public health. We work closely with UKHSA, and this is part of the wider suite of contributing factors to broader health inequalities and disparities.
Baroness Neuberger: So between the two groups of people we have heard from this morning, the push needs to come to try to tie this together to influence government, because otherwise it will quite easily fall between the cracks. Perhaps we have gone as far as we can.
Lord Winston: I have a point of clarification. Given that this is largely social science, I wanted you to tell me the amount of funding you said you had for research. You said £200,000, but that does not seem anything like sufficient.
Dr Bill Parish: We have a framework contract worth £10 million. We will spend £6 million of that developing the noise modelling tool.
Lord Winston: The mapping.
Dr Bill Parish: Other bodies can call into that framework contract to pursue their own evidence needs for noise. I should add that we also work closely with the devolved Administrations, because they are updating their noise maps at the same time as ours. We have a small additional budget for carrying out specific pieces of research to complement our understanding and underpin the costs and benefits.
Q142 The Chair: We are drawing close to the end of this session. We have pressed you very hard on certain points, and thank you very much for your responses. I feel that you have quite a long list of homework—sorry about that. But I look forward to seeing some reflections in writing on the various points raised.
I forgot to ask one thing at the very beginning. Bill, maybe you could respond to this in writing. We have talked largely about the mapping of exposure to noise, and your £6 million flagship project has been a recurrent theme. Is there something similar for light, and do we know whether light pollution is getting worse—whether more people are exposed to it—or stable? You may have a simple yes/no answer now. Otherwise, please write.
Dr Bill Parish: My simple yes or no answer is no. We do not have nearly such a good understanding about light exposure.
The Chair: Okay, that is a clear response, so we cannot tell whether light pollution is getting worse or better.
Dr Bill Parish: Not objectively.
The Chair: In that case, I will draw the session to a close. I would like to thank our three witnesses—Phil Earl from the Department for Transport, Bill Parish from Defra and Erin Cowburn, from the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities—very much indeed for their evidence.
