Exclusive: Rosamund Adoo-Kissi-Debrah slams pace of government air-quality pledges

The mother of Ella Kissi-Debrah speaks to CIWEM following the government’s response to the Coroner’s Prevention of Future Deaths Report after the reopening of the inquest into the tragic death of her daughter (pictured below) in 2013.

In it the government outlines a raft of measures and proposals to tackle air pollution. These include taking immediate action to increase public awareness about the issue, a commitment that NHS England and Improvement (NHSEI) will continue work on a more systematic approach to asthma management, a further £6 million added to the annual funding pot for local authorities as part of the Air Quality Grant scheme and a commitment to considering the scope and effectiveness of establishing a new national SMS alert system.

“What the government are saying is a good start, but the urgency is lacking,” Rosamund Adoo-Kissi-Debrah tells Miriam Habtesellasie.

“Nothing much is going to happen until October 2022, which is 16 months away, and that’s incredibly disappointing. What we have to remember is that children could continue to die in the interim, and sometimes I feel like we lose sight of that.

“My hope and expectation was that government's outlined commitments would be enshrined in law sooner and would be going through now in the Environment Bill. If the latter had been done then we could have been viewed as a world leader in this area at the forthcoming COP26, encouraging other countries around the globe to take similar action.”

She adds: “I’ve always said to people that if we clean up the air lots of issues with the environment could be solved simultaneously. Clean air has now become a commodity, we cannot get to the stage where only pockets of London have clean air.”

And on new figures from charity Global Action Plan which reveal that 27 per cent of UK schools (nursery, primary, secondary, sixth form) are in areas above the WHO PM2.5 limit of 10ug/m3 she says “those figures are disaster for children”.

She also goes on to argue that we need to stop viewing air pollution as a purely environmental issue, but as a health issue as well. She cites past research from King’s College London and the UK100 network of local leaders which show that spikes in air pollution lead to increased hospital admissions for a range of acute conditions, not only asthma attacks.

Summing up she says: “from my point of view as Ella’s mother my last comment is that it will never be acceptable for any scheme to create air pollution even in the short term”.

Read the government's full response, and list of air quality commitments, here.

Read the Environment Editor Karen Thomas’ compelling interview with Rosamund Adoo-Kissi-Debrah for a more detailed background to the case.