An index of local environmental conditions

We end this atlas by taking just four of the indicators we have mapped in the preceding pages and combining them to create a single index of local environmental conditions. To do this we needed indicators which had been available for the same geographical areas for all of England, Scotland and Wales. They had to be available for the same two pairs of years so that we could see how the index was changing. The most comprehensive sets were available for 2007/08 and 2008/09 – charting the cusp of the crash. Indicators had to be available for every local authority in the country with no missing numbers (otherwise we could not rank our index). These conditions meant that we then had very few choices, as only four sets of data complied with all these requirements. This is data about the general environments of the areas people live in and how they are changing, not so much about individual lives.

Indicator 1 – benzene air polluction

The first indicator we chose was benzene air pollution (see Section 6.3). These emissions come mainly from car exhausts but also from industrial plants, and the lower this measure of how much pollution we have to inhale, the better. In 2007 Falkirk in Scotland, the town adjacent to the Grangemouth oil refinery, recorded the highest recorded emissions with 1.76 tonnes being emitted over every square kilometre of land (t/sq km) in the town. Next highest then was the industrial district of Stockton-on-Tees at 1.11 t/sq km. By 2008 pollution rates in Falkirk had risen to 1.85 t/sq km, but traffic and congestion in central London had produced even more damaging overall rates of 1.88 t/sq km, enough in a year to exceed even the pollution near oil refineries and giant chemical works. In 2008 benzene pollution rates in Westminster (1.35 t/sq km), Kensington & Chelsea (1.32), Southampton (1.16), Islington (1.15), Lambeth (1.05), Hammersmith & Fulham (1.04), Tower Hamlets (1.02) and Camden (0.95) ranked from third to tenth highest after the City of London and Falkirk, and all exceeded those of Stockton-on-Tees that year, despite the chemical works there.

The lowest recorded rates of benzene pollution were 0.01 t/sq km across Argyll & Bute in 2008, 188 times less than in the City of London.