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On 13 July, at the Royal Society of Medicine, the minister responsible for air quality, Emma Hardy, told a room of council leaders, officers and campaigners that the air is cleaner today ‘because of the leadership shown by the people within this room'.The report put a figure on it: local action prevented almost 14,000 deaths – roughly the size of the population of Berwick-upon-Tweed – and avoided around £15bn in damage to health and the economy between 2019 and 2025.A further 3,900 lives and £2.4bn could have been saved had strategic authorities been empowered and resourced to use the powers they already hold. The report proposed a way to close that gap – a regional clean air leadership model built around the new strategic authorities.But the conversation in the room that day kept returning to a question the report had not necessarily been written to answer. What happens when a council succeeds?Two weeks after the conference, the Government answered part of that question. On 28 July it revoked Southampton's nitrogen dioxide directions, the eighth set of directions lifted since June 2025, after Dudley, Sandwell, Solihull, the Blackwater Valley, Derby, South Gloucestershire and Wolverhampton.Each area had achieved and maintained the legal limit. The revocation letters confirmed compliance.But they do not say anything about what comes next. The funding attached to the direction goes with it and the authority that did the work is left to decide on its own whether cleaner air is clean enough.Outside those eight authorities, councils like Bath and North East Somerset and Sheffield are asking the same questions.As UK100 chief executive Christopher Hammond said in July, compliance risked being treated as a finish line despite still falling behind new World Health Organisation targets, rather than the foundations of ambitions. There was no national plan for what comes next.Over the summer, we shared our Breathing Life briefing with parliamentarians of all stripes, including members of the Environmental Audit Committee, which had heard from UK100's Clean Air Network in May as part of its ongoing air pollution inquiry.Last month, the committee called ministers from across government departments to be questioned as part of that inquiry.The Committee asked the question on our members' lips. Public health minister, Dame Diana Johnson, pointed to the duty the Devolution Act has just placed on mayoral and strategic authorities to consider the health of their populations.Martin Rhodes MP asked: ‘What resources are going in for them to deliver on those responsibilities'.Barry Gardiner MP asked whether there should be ‘a national framework that each mayor and community could look at and say, "If we go down that route, we know what support we will get from government"'.UK100 and our Clean Air Network will spend the autumn exploring what life after compliance actually looks like in the places living it, and we will put that evidence in front of the minister's team when the call for evidence opens.At the crux of the session was the question minister Hardy offered to a question from MP Julia Buckley about what comes after the targets are met. The DEFRA minister responsible for air quality said: ‘Once a local area reaches compliance with an air quality strategy, it is "Box ticked – done."‘What I want to think about through the strategy and the call for evidence, and working with everyone, is rather than just saying: "Right, you've met it – tick," asking, "How about continuous improvement? What more could be done? What could we do next?"'She also confirmed that work on the next national Air Quality Strategy, which the Government must produce by 2028, will start this year with a call for evidence, rather than waiting for the deadline.That is the opening our members have been waiting for, and we welcome it.UK100 and our Clean Air Network will spend the autumn exploring what life after compliance actually looks like in the places living it, and we will put that evidence in front of the minister's team when the call for evidence opens.We will also continue working with the DEFRA team developing the next Air Quality Strategy, and with officers across our member authorities on what the answer to the post-compliance question would look like.In July, the minister told a room of local leaders that progress on cleaner air was up to them. Last Monday, she told Parliament that the system needs to start asking what authorities should do next.Our hope is simple: we want to see the action which has saved almost 14,000 lives since 2019 recognised in the next steps ministers take on air quality, and we want to be given the framework and the funding to keep going.Daniel Grieve is membership projects officer for the UK100 Clean Air NetworkIf your authority has had a direction lifted, is approaching compliance or seeking to be more ambitious, UK100 wants to hear from you.Contact Daniel Grieve daniel.grieve@uk100.org

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AIR QUALITY

Breathing life into the air quality debate

By Daniel Grieve | 05 October 2026

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