For parents, there is nothing worse than worrying about the health and wellbeing of your child. Unfortunately, we have now reached the point where across the UK the air that children are breathing is damaging their health.

In many areas of public health we have rightly taken action to protect children, such as guidelines on what pregnant women can safely consume or banning smoking in cars with children. But when it comes to air pollution we do not know how many of our children are being put at risk just from going to school.

There is some evidence to show that many schools could be affected by illegal and dirty air. Last year it was estimated that over 2,000 schools and nurseries were within 150 metres of roads with illegal levels of air pollution. So we find ourselves in a situation where we rightly banned advertising for smoking near our children’s schools, but at the same time allow them to be poisoned by dirty air from road transport and other sources.

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Children are more vulnerable to breathing in polluted air than adults. For their size, they breathe more air each minute than an adult. Buggies and prams put them at the level of car exhausts. Breathing illegal and harmful levels of air pollution triggers asthma attacks and can make those attacks more severe, increasing the risk that they will end up in hospital or worse. It can also stunt their lung growth, causing further health problems as they grow up. They are at greater risk of cancer when they are older and suffer more from infections like pneumonia.

Legal limits of air pollution should have been met in 2010, but government projections suggest that, without further action, this will not happen until 2028 in London and 2021 in other urban areas. Much of the UK suffers from levels of some pollutants that are over World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines that are based on the latest scientific evidence.

We need to take action on air pollution and we need to do it quickly, as it affects all of us in many areas of the country. But we can and should go much faster to protect our children.

That’s why we’re proud to launch the Clean Air for Children programme on Wednesday. The programme has been put together by parents across the country who have joined the Clean Air Parents’ Network. It calls for emergency measures to protect children and babies’ lungs from illegal and harmful levels of air pollution where they learn and where they play.

Without delay, the government must monitor and identify all schools affected by illegal and harmful levels of pollution. Parents rightly want reliable, transparent information of a school’s exam results. It is inexcusable that we do not have the same for air pollution.

But an audit must be accompanied by action. We should be bringing in traffic exclusion zones to help reduce children’s exposure to pollution. This approach has worked in places across the UK, such as Edinburgh, Solihull and Hounslow, but it needs to happen faster and in many more places.

We also need to stop building schools, nurseries and playgrounds in pollution hotspots. Research suggests that in England alone over 6,000 new school places have been approved in locations that are on or near illegally polluted roads since 2012. And we need to consider new laws in the forthcoming environment bill to safeguard our right to breathe clean air with limits based on the WHO guidelines.

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These are practical solutions to protect our children from the harm air pollution can cause.

We could do all of this with political will. This must be an alliance of local government and national government, but national government needs to step up. Just £150m could help roll out emergency measures to prioritise the health of children where they learn and where they play.

This matters because the damage dirty air can do to children’s lungs may never be reversed and it could put them at higher risk of developing further health problems in later life. This is a public health emergency and it is about time we started treating it as such.

• Maria Miller is the Conservative MP for Basingstoke and a former secretary of state for culture, media and sport; Ed Miliband is the Labour MP for Doncaster North and is a former Labour party leader