Working together for cleaner air in Southwark

Key information:

• Partner: Southwark Council
• Amount: £120,000
• Duration: 27 months
• Programme: Health effects of air pollution

What are we doing together?

In urban areas like the London borough of Southwark, air pollution is the greatest environmental risk to health. But it doesn’t affect everyone equally. It disproportionately prevents certain groups of people from living healthy and happy lives. For example, racially minoritised people and those living in lower income areas.

This is particularly relevant in Southwark because the borough has a rich social and ethnic mix, including a large Black population. And over a third of its residents live in areas with the highest levels of deprivation in England. To make Southwark a healthier place to live, we need to urgently find solutions to the problem of air pollution.

We’re funding a dedicated air quality post within Southwark Council’s public health team. This will support the council by providing much-needed additional resource to improve air quality. The postholder will lead and coordinate work to reduce the health effects of air pollution across five key areas:

1. Developing and delivering council projects focused on addressing three key sources of urban air pollution – housing, construction and the freight system. These could include retrofitting homes to improve indoor air quality, creating exemplar clean construction sites and encouraging small organisations to use cargo bikes instead of polluting diesel vans for deliveries.
2. Assessing how the council could further incorporate air quality into its climate-related projects.
3. Supporting strategic collaboration between our team and council teams, including environmental protection, planning and housing.
4. Connecting our community-led partners with council policymakers
5. Promoting evidence-based work on air quality and climate change at the council, working with the Southwark Insights and Intelligence Programme. This includes encouraging community-based action research approaches.

Aim of the partnership

This partnership aims to strengthen our existing relationships with Southwark Council while helping us to develop important new ones. We want to learn more about how we can work strategically with local councils, particularly on cross-departmental projects, to help them to achieve cleaner air and better health for residents. We also want to explore how community leaders can be directly and equitably involved in co-designing council policy. This partnership will help us to answer these questions.

By taking a more strategic and integrated approach, we will also be able to test solutions that reduce the harmful effects of air pollution from three of our priority sources in Southwark: construction, freight and housing. Clear strategies and objectives will be developed for each source. We hope this will help to deliver and demonstrate improvements in both air quality and residents’ health in the borough.

At the end of the funding period, we will share what we learn to inform future work with Southwark Council, other London boroughs and UK local authorities.

Connection to our strategy

A priority for our programme is to reduce air pollution at source in a way that has the deepest impact on improving health equity in urban areas. That means focusing on the sources of air pollution that disproportionately affect minoritised and economically disadvantaged people. Examples of this are damp and mould in people’s homes, congested arterial roads full of diesel vans, and dirty construction sites located in highly populated areas.

This partnership will target interventions in areas of Southwark with high numbers of racially minoritised people and people living on a low income. This could significantly reduce these groups’ exposure to the harmful effects of air pollution.

Our programme also aims to ensure that racialised and economically disadvantaged people are prioritised and involved in change for clean air. Through this partnership, we are also working with Southwark Council to amplify the voices of local residents to influence policy decisions that affect air quality.