Air Quality and New Housing
New housing is firmly on the agenda for the freshly elected Labour government with the eye-catching pledge of 1.5 million new homes by the end of the parliament and a string of commitments including the building of new homes on ‘Grey Belt’ land.
With this in mind, it’s worth considering that residential developments are some of the most sensitive developments that we work on with regards to air quality issues. Stemming from the introduction of new sensitive receptors in the form of dwellings combined with the potential additional traffic they create on the road network. Here at Vale we have extensive expertise in the air quality assessment of residential Developments of all scales, including EIA, and have broken down the potential issues in to three distinct phases.
The initial concern, as with any Development is that of construction dust effects. As we covered a few weeks ago these can be as a result of a wide range of common construction processes and can lead to both human health issues and amenity complaints. At Vale we specialise in providing best practice control measures for use in Environmental Management Plans to be secured by planning conditions, and also offer construction dust monitoring for the most sensitive sites.
Next the suitability of the site must be considered, specifically, are new residential receptors going to be introduced into areas at which there is already a dangerous level of pollutants? The best method for ascertaining this information is determined by the specific site in question. The most common approach is a desk-based assessment including a reviewing of available background data from central government modelling programmes supported by an assessment of local authority monitoring. These resources are not available at every site however. Where this is the case, or the physical geography of the site is complex or poorly understood, there is no better solution than a monitoring campaign using low-cost sensors or diffusion tubes, in which we have extensive experience of monitoring the most sensitive sites at both inner city and rural locations.
Finally, air quality beyond the site boundary must be considered. Large residential schemes can have a profound impact on the number of vehicle movements on the local road network, creating traffic where there previously was none or adding further pressure to congestion and pollution blackspots. Assessing the impacts of Development traffic on existing receptors is the final step in any air quality assessment. Where there is expected to be a significant increase in daily trips, or there already exits an air quality concern such as an Air Quality Management Area (AQMA), dispersion modelling of emissions is often required. This will compare future scenarios with and without the Development with the results compared with air quality objectives to determine a level of significance at the most sensitive existing local receptors. Here at Vale we specialise in the use of industry standard ADMS modelling software as developed by Cambridge Environmental Research Consultants.
Vale Air Quality consulting has considerable experience in all three of these assessment aspects, as well as a further range of more involved and bespoke assessments. We stand ready to support residential developments of any and all sizes as they come forward in light of the latest government policy.
