Current Campaigns

Sustainable Ottery welcomes the launch of the health air campaign by Neil Parish MP (MP for Tiverton and Honiton)

The Healthy Air Campaign seeks to increase public awareness and understanding of the health impacts of air pollution and help communities mitigate those impacts and adapt to reduce them.

Every year, 29,000 premature deaths are attributable to poor air quality in the UK – nearly 5% of all annual UK deaths – with an average loss of life expectancy of eleven years. The most vulnerable in our communities are the worst affected, with children, the elderly, and those with existing health problems.

Recent research suggests that air pollution can lead to the onset of asthma in children, permanently reduce lung capacity and trigger heart attacks and strokes in those already at risk.

In Sustainable Ottery we are doing our bit for the campaign to support vulnerable (as well as currently healthy) people in Ottery by writing to East Devon District Council urging them to monitor the quality of our air properly. They have not reported on our air quality since 2008 and they have only one very poor monitoring station in Gold St Ottery as opposed to 13 in Honiton.

We have offered to pay for monitoring equipment. We will inform you of their response.

Even though EDDC’s own Environmental Health Customer Charter http://www.eastdevon.gov.uk/eh_charter.pdf makes it clear it is their responsibility to monitor air quality and pollution, we believe the health of vulnerable people in Ottery is too important to waste time penny pinching; especially when the amount of traffic in our town is about to increase considerably, so we are putting our money where our mouth is and we hope this will help EDDC meet its duty to monitor and report properly.

For more information you can visit the Healthy Air Campaign website at www.healthyair.org.uk or follow them of Twitter: @HealthyAirUK.