Britain needs to do more to clean up its dirty air as it is a “major public health scandal”. So says the environment secretary Michael Gove. He’s right. The UK has been unlawfully breaching nitrogen dioxide limits since 2010. The government has been taken to court and lost three times. Finally a minister is committing to a clean air strategy that restricts diesel use “to ensure our air is properly breathable”. These words won’t be easy to walk back from. Neither should they be. Pollution cuts short an estimated 40,000 lives each year, and affects neurodevelopment and foetal growth.



Until Thursday the cabinet minister appeared unwilling to do much about it. Mr Gove was unmoved by the admonitions of the UN when it said Britain was flouting its duty to protect citizens from pollution. Mr Gove, a Brexiter, no doubt did not care that the European Union is preparing legal action against Britain for breaching air-quality laws. It was under the European acquis that the high court said the government’s clean air plan was “unlawful”. In Mr Gove’s view, foreign courts should not hold ministers of the crown to account and their influence should end at our shores. In Brexit Britain it will not be judges but voters, whose lives are being shortened by breathing in filth, who will hold ministers to account.

This spectacle of moral pusillanimity, political ineptitude and Brexit confusion could not continue. MPs on the select committees cannot be faulted for portraying diesel vehicles as the main villains. Carmakers were exposed for playing with people’s lives by cheating emissions tests. Diesels are much more polluting than petrol cars, and the biggest proportion of pollution in UK cities does come from road transport. Scolding ministers for their timidity, MPs are right to say the government has to be much more ambitious and bring forward the ban on the sale of new diesel and petrol cars from the current 2040 deadline. Many European cities want to ban diesel by 2025. Mr Gove’s a big thinker. He should be bolder.

The environment secretary has willed the ends, but he cannot solely will the means. The levers to address the problem of air pollution lie with colleagues in the Treasury and transport. Mr Gove, the epitome of politeness, needs to cajole and flatter his colleagues into submission. To make a big difference ministers need to curb dirty-vehicle use. They will need to implement a diesel scrappage scheme, in which drivers would be paid for trading in dirty old vehicles for cleaner ones; set up clean air zones so that city centres can charge motorists for using road space; and provide cash for large-scale public transport schemes.

Most acutely, ministers must face up to the political cost of angering diesel drivers, previously encouraged to buy the vehicles because of their lower carbon-dioxide emissions. Whitehall could produce a national policy but it would be better if it was devolved to local authorities, along with the cash required to pay for the step change in motorists’ behaviour. London’s Sadiq Khan has blazed a trail that others should be able to follow. What should not be devolved to metro mayors is the responsibility to tackle air pollution without the policies or cash to deal with it. Mr Gove sold Brexit as a way to bring power back from Brussels. It should not end up concentrated in Whitehall.