The government can only end air pollution if it confronts the big, poisonous elephants in the room

Another day, another study warning us about the dangers of air pollution. Around the world, scientists have predicted the average child born today will have 20 months knocked off his or her life thanks to toxic gases and particles in the air.

An unpleasant conclusion maybe, but not a surprising one. Air pollution has been blamed for respiratory problems, heart disease, dementia, psychosis, miscarriage – the list goes on.

It has been called “the new tobacco” and a “public health emergency” by the head of the World Health Organisation. Nine in 10 people globally are breathing toxic air, and at least 800,000 Europeans are being killed by it every year.

Given all this, it is a constant source of amazement to me that air pollution is not seen as a bigger deal. We are talking about gases creeping into people’s lungs and brains, bringing with them disease and death. Children going to school in central London are growing up with lungs that are physically smaller due to constant exposure to traffic fumes.

I don’t want people cowering indoors, terrified to take a gasp of air or let their children go to school. But if this doesn’t rouse action, what will?

I suspect it is because, for many of us, this is still an invisible problem. Those scary smogs blanketing Asian megacities have not been seen in Britain for decades, and despite the headlines no one’s death certificate simply reads “air pollution”.

So as with that other great environmental peril – climate change – it is easy to file under “someone else’s problem”. Maybe that’s fine if you’re just a person living in Plymouth or Hull, happily breathing toxic air and going about your business. But if you are a government minister, it is not good enough.

Again and again, politicians have been told that pollution in British towns has reached levels that are not only unsafe but illegal; again and again the warning has been met with a lacklustre response.

The government has talked a good game, announcing a “world leading” strategy to deal with the problem and making a big deal out of the chunks of funding it has allocated to clean up Britain’s toxic streets. But every time they make a new announcement, green campaigners respond with scepticism.

To be fair, part of a green campaigner’s job is to critique government efforts to help the environment if they are anything less than perfect, but there are legitimate grievances to be had here.

It is all very well cracking down on wood burning stoves and ammonia gas from farms, as Michael Gove has pledged to do, but while there are plenty of people in the UK who don’t own a wood-burning stove – or a farm – an awful lot of them do own cars. They are the big, poisonous elephants in the room, the ones that must be taken on if the government is going to really make a difference.

Doing this requires collaboration with that smoothest of political operators, Chris Grayling, and his transport department. They too have said tackling pollution is a top priority, while setting distant targets for a phase-out of petrol vehicles and investing whopping sums in new roads that we don’t really need.

Now I’m sure it costs a lot to build a road, so the £25.3bn set aside for new projects may be very reasonable. But it makes a bit of a mockery of the £3.5bn Mr Gove’s department has pledged to clean up emissions from transport. The government may care about air pollution, but it clearly cares about other things a lot more.

As for taking on the four-wheeled menace, this will require some meddling in people’s lives that not everyone will appreciate.

Next week will see the launch of Sadiq Khan’s ultra-low emission zone, a project that will ultimately see Londoners from Enfield to Lewisham having to pay £12.50 for every day they use a high polluting vehicle in the city. It’s a bold move – one that is meant to incentivise a shift to cleaner transport and save lives, but will doubtless be met with outrage by many who see it as a horrendous injustice.

The thing is, government analysis has shown that these kinds of zones are exactly what we need to clean up our cities. Winning people over will require investment in scrappage schemes, and incentives to buy cleaner vehicles. It may cost a lot, but considering the billions in social and health costs air pollution takes from the economy every year, it is still unlikely to match the scale of the crisis.

People are dying. This is serious.