🫁 When the policy doesn't have lungs

My grandmother died this time last year, at the grand old age of 98.

I lived about half an hour away from her when I was at university, and I’d jump on the train every month or so to see her. We would debate Middle Eastern politics, I’d show her how to do things on her computer, and—very importantly—she’d cook me a proper meal.

My grandmother’s catch phrase was: “But what does it mean?” When she said “mean”, it was like she was using a medieval torture device to stretch those vowels out as far as they could go.

Many of us in the policy world would do well to have my grandmum sitting on our shoulders as we write. Perhaps today’s interview with Jemima Hartshorn, the founder of Mums for Lungs, illustrates why.

School Streets is a scheme intended to protect school children from cars—both in terms of not getting run over, but also from pollution—at the start and end of every day. Jemima lays out how School Streets is sound policy, but politically challenging. As we spoke, I had my grandmum at the back of my mind.

What does “School Streets” communicate as a name? That this street happens to have a school on it? It certainly doesn’t communicate the value of the policy. What if it were called a School Shield?

Jemima gives the example below of how some journalists report on School Streets through the frame of revenue raising. The policy isn't about protecting kids, the headlines argue; it’s a cash cow. I wonder what difference it would make if the name signalled the policy outcome. Local authorities making money from drivers missing road signs is one thing—but making money from drivers who have actively driven through, pierced, a School Shield paints a somewhat different picture.

Tom

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Nudging: useful or immaterial?

It sometimes feels like you can do incremental change through behaviour change, right? If some of us choose not to drive, not to have deliveries, not to burn our fires, not to use the gas stove at home, we can reduce air pollution levels. That’s true–but the result is going to be limited. 

Really in order to achieve the change that is needed, it requires the government to step in and make interventions that then result in national behaviour change. Across the country, we are experiencing air pollution levels that cannot be tinkered with. They need to be addressed, and that requires political leadership.

The policy is there, but is the politics?

What we have seen in air pollution is that the modelling of interventions, and how they translate via behaviour change into air pollution reduction, is really precise. Precise in the sense that the ULEZ [London's traffic scheme designed to reduce air pollution by discouraging the use of older, more polluting vehicles] is doing exactly what it was meant to do, and a tiny little bit more.

So the understanding of what drives people to do certain things—such as driving at certain times, in certain cars, in certain places—is well-established. The fact that these models are playing out in real life with the policies that have been enacted has given me loads of confidence in experts, it’s great!

But clearly politically this is not the time and place for more clean air zones to be introduced anytime soon, and that is where the problem is. The challenge is not mapping the solutions to the problem. It’s the communications, the narrative, the politics… that is where we are struggling to make progress.

Does your policymaker need evidence, or ammunition?

I've been campaigning on air pollution from road transport for nine years. No local authority officer that I've ever spoken to needs compelling evidence. They know the problem. They know the reality. Usually, what we hear from policy officials is that they want to go much further, faster, and quicker.

That’s not the same as the wider public. Lots of people have heard that air pollution is a problem, but I think the vast majority still don't truly understand that their lung or heart issues might already be linked to the dirty air they are breathing or  it could very well impact their own lives and the future. That is what we, as a clean air movement, need to change. We need to make it more personal—making it a topic that isn't just a 'nice to have', but something that viscerally impacts you.

Does our focus on ‘stories’ trivialise reality?

I want to push back on the notion of 'stories' because I dislike the term. That is both because it sounds a bit like make-belief, and relatedly because this is about health and real-life human experience. These are people going to the hospital with their children. These are people losing children to air pollution, whose lives are impacted on a daily basis. These are people who have heart disease and cancer. These aren’t stories, they are people’s lives. It makes much more sense to use terms like ‘narratives’ or ‘arguments’.

Think about your messengers (it may not be you)

We've consistently made a strong argument for the ULEZ. Being on the radio as normal people, as parents—people the public can relate to—really works. It helps immensely in a time when political messengers are often viewed with controversy, and when discussions around cars, even if they relate to health, are constantly dragged into culture wars.

Not everyone has the same incentive

A School Street is a scheme where you close the road next to a school to through-traffic twice a day for about an hour, right when huge numbers of children are walking to school. We know that children breathe in a disproportionate amount of air pollution during the school run, so a School Street is a really obvious solution.

And yet, the media headlines we see are often along the lines of, “XYZ local authority has made this much money through School Streets.” The way these schemes make money is that there will be a road sign stating you’re not allowed to drive there at a certain time, accompanied by a camera. If people still drive through it, they get a fine.

So rather than asking why drivers are ignoring road signs, the media frames the scheme as a cash cow. Which then turns people against a scheme that is there to look after our kids. Is this what the media should be doing?

Thank you to the 100 (woop!) readers who have referred a colleague to Policy Unstuck.