Putting people first: delivering clean air zone projects

Poor air quality is described by Public Health England as “the largest environmental risk to public health in the UK”, with long-term exposure to air pollution causing conditions including lung cancer, cardiovascular and respiratory diseases, reducing life expectancy. Researchers estimate around 40,000 deaths a year can be linked to air pollution.

Road transportation is a major contributor to poor air quality, producing a substantial proportion of air pollutants: a third of nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions came from transport in 2021. As part of the UK Government’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs’ (Defra’s) Clean Air Strategy, published in 2019, local authorities with areas of poor air quality have been asked to create ‘Clean Air Zones’ – areas where targeted action is taken to reduce NOx concentrations. These areas are being put in place in cities across the country, from Portsmouth, Bath and Bristol in the South West, to Birmingham in the Midlands, to Bradford, Sheffield, Newcastle and Gateshead in the North.

Clean Air Zones reduce air pollution by levying a charge on some, or all, of the vehicles that drive within a specific area. This helps improve air quality in these areas by changing behaviours – encouraging people to use less-polluting options for transportation, such as trains, walking or cycling, or to shift to low or zero-emission vehicles. As part of our commitment to engineering a better future for our planet and its people, AtkinsRéalis’ project teams have been working with a number of local authorities to help them set up and implement their Clean Air Zones (CAZs), with the aim of improving air quality for their residents. These complex programmes require many core project management skills – from stakeholder management, to ensuring the integration of technologies to tight deadlines. At their heart, however, they are about people.

Connecting people

People are at the centre of CAZ projects: experts deliver the project, stakeholders influence the project and the public benefit from the project. Stakeholder management, in particular, is critical to the successful delivery of clean air zones: people at all levels, from government, to suppliers, to drivers need to understand their roles in improving air quality.

Buy-in from local authority leadership is key – the authority needs to have the resource capacity in place to deliver the CAZ. These resource requirements and business process flows are multi-layered and complex, going beyond simply signage and automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) systems. A CAZ project must translate a series of connected systems and infrastructure into a working scheme, so that people can understand when they need to pay, and how they do so. Alongside the IT software, which matches up images captured with traffic data from the DVSA, different payment scenarios must be put in place, including payment prior to and after travel, exemptions and refunds.

With the ability to integrate technology, coupled with our understanding of local authorities, as project managers, we are helping authorities manage the creation of relationships between the multiple suppliers and owners of these systems, ensuring integration runs smoothly and that target outcomes are being delivered. We also help authorities to identify which resources they already have in place – an existing system to monitor bus lanes perhaps – and to consider whether people to manage the system can be sourced internally or need to be recruited.

Transparent discussion

For a CAZ project, excellent communication with stakeholders is essential. It should include as many of the groups affected as possible: from taxi drivers and transport company representatives; to people who run recovery vehicles and the local ambulance service. To combat potential protests, it’s important that authorities are transparent about the scope of the scheme: for example, the reasoning behind both the area covered by the zone and any vehicle exemptions. Communication can also share information on the support available to stakeholders, such as incentive schemes for those who choose to replace their vehicles with lower emission ones. Early engagement can produce great results: in one authority, we saw 95% compliance with the CAZ by local taxis.

Discussions with diverse stakeholders can also help everyone understand that these zones are not put in place as ‘money-making’ schemes, they are aimed at protecting the health of residents. This message is reinforced if the revenue generated by CAZ schemes is used to invest in environmentally-beneficial measures, such as cycleways, to subsidise electric- or hydrogen-powered buses, or to redesign infrastructure to encourage walking. In providing evidence of responsible investment by the local authority, a CAZ can also demonstrate to central government that the authority is a ‘safe pair of hands’ for additional investment opportunities.

A supportive team

With people at the heart of CAZ projects, building relationships with all stakeholders requires a people-centric approach, using the ‘softer’ project management skills to develop a cohesive team – one that is based on friendliness, trust, and an open, supportive, psychologically-safe culture. This applies across and between both external and internal teams. Team-building, for those working on CAZ schemes, can also be fostered by the shared passion for making a difference, improving air quality to benefit the lives of others – particularly if they have a child or relation who has asthma or another respiratory illness.

Because CAZs do make a difference. Despite protests against its implementation, London’s Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) has already helped improve air quality in the city. Since it launched in central London in 2019, it has helped cut the number of older, polluting vehicles on the road, and helped reduce harmful nitrogen oxides (NOx) by 46% in central London and 21% in inner London. As APM members we all know that when projects succeed, society benefits, and we’re proud to be helping authorities ensure their residents can take a deep breath of clean air.

co-written by Ian Sadler

Ian Sadler is a Senior Technical Consultant (Systems Integration and Test Management) –