Battersea and Wandsworth Trades Union Council (BWTUC) has said it is very concerned about the way its local council is portraying the ongoing battle against air pollution.
The March 2019 edition of the LB Wandsworth magazine Brightside contains the headline ‘Pollution plummets’ above an article declaring that ‘Wandsworth’s air pollution levels fell again in 2018, new figures show’.
“It is correct to say that pollution levels have gone down in Putney. Whether they have ‘plummeted’ is another matter,” said a BWTUC spokesperson. Profiling nitrogen dioxide levels over time, it seems correct to say there was a drop from 76 micrograms per cubic metre to 66 mg/m3 between 2017 and 2018. But this is still well over 50% above the safe EU limits.
The BWTUC goes onto say that the council “shows a further disregard for the facts by failing to mention that for other parts of the borough like Clapham Junction, Tooting and Wandsworth, the figures have not dropped at all, but have flat-lined or got worse.”¹ For example, in Tooting in 2018 the average was 53mg/m3 compared to the period up to the present in 2019 where it is 58mg/m3.² The Council’s own Tooting Air Quality Action Plan has never been properly implemented and isn’t even on the council web site.
Nowhere in the article does it make it clear that there are dangerous levels of pollution in the borough, says the BWTUC. It is presented in a way that tries to give the impression residents can rest assured that their leaders are on top of the problem. Nothing could be further from the truth.
In another “shameless effort to manipulate the information on the reduction of NO2 levels in Putney” the article goes on to say that “the fall has been attributed to the council successfully lobbying Transport for London for cleaner buses.” This ignores the fact that the council was just one of many organisations who lobbied for this. A clear case of trying to take the credit for a TfL decision upon which their own impact was marginal.
Graham Petersen, a BWTUC spokesperson, said: “Brightside magazine has long been criticised for using council tax-payers money to pump out Wandsworth Conservative Party propaganda,” and he regretted the appearance of similar tactics in relation to such an important matter of public health.
Notes
¹ Wandsworth Monitoring sites visualisation http://www.londonair.org.uk/LondonAir/Data-Visualisations/objectivevstime.aspx
² London Air Quality Network Statistics
http://www.londonair.org.uk/london/asp/publicstats.asp?mapview=all&statyear=2018&MapType=Google®ion=0&site=WAB&postcode=&la_id=&objective=All&zoom=9&lat=51.475&lon=-0.11982399999999416&VenueCode=
