Hertfordshire County Council and KNOW-PH collaborated to explore how community champion roles (in this case, Clean Air champions) could make a difference to and improve the lives of local residents. KNOW-PH brought in evidence on models, roles and the value of champions from NIHR studies; Hertfordshire brought together a network of interested people including charities, elected members and local officials. Together, we made sense of the evidence and local knowledge to create a pathway to Clean Air community champions.
View our interactive presentation from the collaboration below.
Air pollution can impact human health, the economy, and the environment. In many instances air quality has been improving in recent years however poor air quality is still the largest environmental risk to public health in the UK. The Royal College of Physicians 2025 report, A breathe of fresh air, scrutinised the evidence and estimated that around 30,000 deaths per year in the UK are as a result of air pollution. Alongside this, an economic cost of £27 billion in the UK due to healthcare costs, productivity losses and reduced quality of life. When wider impacts such as dementia are accounted for, the economic cost may be as high as £50bn.
Despite the health burden there is still a lack of awareness in the public domain or any national co-ordinated public health cleaner air campaigning available to provide trusted information on the health impacts of short and long term air pollution.
Local authorities have been promoting information on air quality linked to their statutory duties for many years. We partnered with Hertfordshire County Council (HCC) where East of England regional Clean Air Champion, Matthew Clark, is employed. In Hertfordshire they have been active in their engagement activity around cleaner air through their Let’s Clear the Air campaign. They promoted national Clean Air Day and were the founding partner enabling the inaugural national Clean Air Night campaign launch in 2024 which focuses on wood burning in the home. Despite all of this they feel it is still challenging to get their messages across to the public.
The concept of community champions is not new to the cleaner air agenda. The Clean Air Programme, which promotes tackling indoor and outdoor air pollution for a better healthier future, has created a clean air champion’s network with a national core currently made up of Sir Prof Stephen Holgate, Dr Gary Fuller and Dr Suzanne Bartington. Alongside this a regional champion base has been established helping to connect organisations across a range of sectors including research, industry, government departments and local authorities to better predict air pollution’s health effects and promote the transfer of knowledge into policy and action. Work has been carried out by local authorities and organisations to create clean air champions within communities with great success but the concept and pathway to creating these community based networks has not been fully explored.
Together the KNOW-PH team and HCC collaborated to focus on how to create cleaner air community champions. The KNOW-PH team considered the existing published evidence base while HCC brought together local authorities across the East of England region with organisations who had experience in community champion networks to create an event where participants explored the KNOW-PH synthesised work and discuss key aspects involved in generating community champions. The KNOW-PH team have reviewed the information collected from the evidence base along with key areas of discussion from the event to produce the following resource.
Special thanks to Global Action Plan, Ashtma+Lung UK, Sandwell Council and the WellHome research study for presentations at the event.
If you would like to know more, please contact
matthew.clark@hertfordshire.gov.uk
An archived version of this mini website can be accessed via this link.