Barry Gardiner – 2014 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Barry Gardiner on 2014-04-08.

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, which air quality monitoring stations went off-line in each year since 2010-11; and on what dates they were off-line.

Dan Rogerson

Defra operates an extensive monitoring network of nearly 300 sites in order to assess air quality in the UK and report to the EU for compliance. Many of these sites have multiple instruments measuring different pollutants.

The Automatic and Urban Network has 130 sites that provide information on five key pollutants on an hourly basis. Information from this network is updated hourly on the UK Air website to provide the most recent data to the public.

An extensive Programme of maintenance, auditing and site inspections is required to maintain the networks operation. EU directives state that instruments must be operational for a minimum period of time for data to be reported and these requirements are met in our annual compliance reporting.

It is therefore not possible to provide information on the specific times when instruments were not operational during the last four years, but I refer the hon. Member for Brent North to the UK’s annual compliance report for statistics regarding data capture at each site, at:

http://uk-air.defra.gov.uk/library/annualreport/index

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