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The Chancellor has pledged more money to tackle the air quality crisis. Pic: Johannes Plenio for Unsplash

Spending Review includes £30m to tackle ‘crisis in air quality’

 1 min | By Gill Oliver
 | Energy | Comms | Ecology | Sep 4th 2019

Decarbonisation, air quality and biodiversity are to receive a multi-million funding boost, it was announced today in the Chancellor’s Spending Review. Sajid Javid promised to provide £30m of ‘new money to tackle the crisis in our air quality’ and also pledged another £30m for biodiversity, including an expansion of the Government’s Blue Belt programme, an ongoing scheme to protect marine species such as turtles, whales and seabirds.

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As part of overall efforts to ‘step up leadership’ on climate change, the Chancellor promised new funding for the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (BEIS) to develop new programmes to help meet the UK’s net zero commitment by 2050. Detailed plans for decarbonisation in the infrastructure strategy will be set out later this year, he said.

The Chancellor also told the House of Commons it was “not good enough that small business owners waste so much time because of slow internet speeds and poor mobile communications.”

He added: “We’re going to change that. We want faster broadband for everyone in the country. Quicker mobile connections and better signal coverage.”

The central pledge of the Spending Review was an increase in public spending for 2020-2021 by £13.8bn – a rise of 4.1 per cent. Major areas of investment will be in health, education and the police. Full details of the Spending Round, which sets out the government’s expenditure plans for 2020-21, are here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/spending-round-2019-document/spending-round-2019#departmental-settlements

 

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About the Author

Gill Oliver

Gill Oliver is a professionally trained journalist who’s written for The New Statesman, The Bureau for Investigative Journalism, The Daily Mail’s business section This is Money, The Press Association, The Huffington Post plus a host of national magazines, news agencies and trade and industry journals. She’s also spent nine years reporting on the Oxfordshire business and tech scene for The Oxford Times and The Oxford Mail.

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