A consultation paper has been circulated for the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA) to assume responsibility for management of the local authority air quality monitoring network.
The Scottish Government believes that SEPA is best placed to take on the management of the local authority air quality monitoring network given its existing reserve powers under the Environment Act 1995. This would allow for maintenance and operation of the local authority air quality monitoring network as a whole to be centrally managed in a single contract.
The Scottish Government believes that bringing the responsibility for the maintenance and operation of the local authority air quality monitoring sites together would result in efficiencies and financial savings, as well as lessening resource burdens on individual local authorities. This would also allow a greater level of standardisation to be achieved across the monitoring network.
Under section 82 of the Environment Act 1995 (the 1995 Act), local authorities are required to regularly review air quality in their areas, and make an assessment of air quality against air quality standards and objectives for several air pollutants of concern for human health. If the assessment shows that any standards or objectives are not being met, or are predicted not to be met by the required dates, the authority concerned must identify any parts of its area where standards or objectives are not likely to be achieved, and designate any area where standards or objectives are not being achieved or are not likely to achieved as an Air Quality Management Area and produce an action plan setting out how it intends to work towards achieving those air quality standards and objectives.
The Scottish air quality monitoring network includes (at the time of writing) 99 high precision fixed location automatic monitoring stations producing data for a range of pollutants in near real time, 78 of which are operated by local authorities (the remainder being operated by central government as part of the UK Automatic Urban and Rural Network (AURN)), and 1,051 (2024 total) lower precision mobile nitrogen dioxide diffusion tubes, all of which are operated by local authorities, both with comprehensive geographical coverage across the country.
Each local authority is responsible for the maintenance and operation of its air quality monitors. Since 1997, grants have been provided by the Scottish Government to individual local authorities to assist them in undertaking their statutory air quality duties, with a particular focus on the responsibility for the operation and maintenance of each authority’s air quality monitoring network, which have expanded significantly over that period.
The Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA) is Scotland’s environmental regulator, and has reserve powers under section 85 of the 1995 Act in relation to local authority air quality management. These powers allow SEPA to conduct its own reviews and assessments of whether air quality standards and objectives are being achieved or are likely to be achieved. In order to exercise these powers, SEPA requires data from the local authority air quality monitoring networks.
