"Defra finally realised it would have to change its complacent approach to public health - blame the local and regional authorities" 

As Jenny Jones settled into the House of Lords, tackling air pollution once again became a priority as the political establishment continued to ignore a mounting public health emergency. 

In 2013, when I started my time in the Lords, I was still a London Assembly member with access to an open plan office, full of wonderful staff. In 2016, when I began full time at the Lords, I had part time staff, plus their expenses, all paid from the £300 a day attendance allowance that I can claim when the house is sitting.  That left me the sole Green in the House, while trying to cover the government’s entire legislative agenda and raising any important green policy issues, like climate change, that were not in the government’s programme.

As much as I enjoy the archaic challenges of working with my fellow peers, the first Bill I put into the House of Lords ballot was to abolish the place from within and get rid of the corrupting influence of Prime Ministerial patronage. My logic being that if the Lords could come together with a plan that combined an elected second chamber, via PR, with retaining some of the unelected (and non-voting) expertise, then the government might have to seriously consider it.

My second attempt at a Private Member's Bill arose directly from my air pollution work in London and my working partnership with Simon Birkett of the London Clean Air Campaign. Simon kindly did the huge amount of leg work in pulling the Bill together.

Jenny and parliamentary colleagues make their views clear on the need for clean air 

From 2016 onwards, the government took us crashing out of the EU and sought to break all promises by ditching the environmental regulations that benefit this country’s people and Nature. During this time, the government lost three court cases that exposed their lack of a plan to deal with air pollution. DEFRA finally realised that they would have to change their complacent approach to public health, as it was leading to the premature deaths of over forty thousand people a year. The civil servants and Ministers were backed into a corner and came up with a new approach that would solve their problems – blame the local and regional authorities.

The national strategy denies that there is a national problem by declaring that local authorities will have the responsibility for dealing with hot spots of pollution. The fact that these ‘hot spots’ cover the majority of the country’s population is glossed over. They also refused to give local authorities the powers to reduce air pollution in a meaningful way and actively criticised councils who tried to implement policies that might make a difference.

This contradiction was made clear when Sadiq Khan, with strong Green Party backing, expanded the Ultra Low Emission Zone to cover the whole of London. Tory politicians queued up like a line of toxic spewing engines to condemn the move, despite the idea being originally put forward by Boris Johnson when he was Mayor.

Jenny has worked closely with Rosamund Kissi-Debrah to promote the Clean Air Bill, known as "Ella's Law", after Rosamund's 9-year-old daughter who died of an asthma attack in 2013, which the coroner ruled was caused by poor air quality. 

The government is now seeking to weaponise the anger of motorists to the ULEZ and 20mph zones, while ignoring the human tragedy that these policies are seeking to end.

Ella Kissi-Debrah died, aged nine, after an acute asthma attack in 2013. She lived near the busy South Circular road in London and had more than 25 emergency hospital admissions in the three years before her death. Plenty had died of air pollution before her, but after a legal fight by her tenacious mother, Ella was the first to have 'Air Pollution' as a cause of death on her death certificate.

I got permission from Ella’s mother, Rosamund, to call my Clean Air Bill “Ella’s Law”. Remarkably, it went to the top of the ballot of several hundred PMBs in 2022 and then sailed through the Lords, gathering a lot of support along the way. Caroline Lucas MP has now taken it up and has kept it on her priority list for the Kings Speech.

The success of this bill is a tribute to all the campaigners who have worked hard to overcome the complacency of the political establishment and get air pollution recognised as a public health emergency. It is also a lesson to Greens that we can achieve great things if we reach out and work closely with others.

This is the final article in our Anniversary Stories series. Thank you to Jenny and everyone who shared their memories of five decades of history making. We'll be publishing stories submitted online in the New Year.

Promoted by Chris Williams on behalf of The Green Party, both at PO Box 78066, London SE16 9GQ