With the former Mayor of Greater Manchester becoming Prime Minister over the summer, devolution has shot up the political agenda. And for good reason, as local leaders are best placed to understand the needs of their local communities. 

And there is no better place to start than on the air communities breathe. Air pollution remains the leading environmental risk to public health in the UK and was linked to 30,000 deaths in 2025. But its effects are not felt equally across all of society. Air pollution disproportionately impacts those from low income and ethnic minority communities, with the health burden falling hardest on children, older people and those with existing health conditions. 

Whilst more work is needed nationally to deliver improvements in air quality, action at the local level is well underway and yielding significant results. This local action for health will be ramped up as the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Act 2026 has introduced a duty on strategic authorities to "have regard to the need to improve the health of… and reduce health inequalities". This would push authorities to consider the environmental determinants of health, such as air quality and green spaces. Mayoral strategic authorities are also now required to produce a health inequalities strategy and report on progress every five years, something the Greater London Authority already does. 

Local governments have long called for more powers and funding to help deliver ambitious change in their areas. Devolution changes have been underway in recent years but are now being accelerated by the new Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, promising the biggest ever “rebalancing of power” away from Whitehall, with plans to allow regional mayors to keep a share of income tax and business rates.

Although they may be lacking in resources, local leaders often outperform national government in terms of ambition. Despite political opposition and lacklustre support from national government, the Mayor of London demonstrated strong leadership by expanding the capital’s Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) to cover the whole city in 2023, after it was first introduced in 2019. And to much success, with deaths linked to air pollution estimated to have fallen by around 40 per cent between 2019 – when ULEZ was first introduced – and 2024, reflecting the impact of air pollution action.

Towns and cities in the UK often look to good practice abroad, such as the Netherlands for the cycling culture, but local action here can also lead to change internationally. Breathe Cities, is a global clean air initiative, delivered by Bloomberg Philanthropies, Clean Air Fund and C40 Cities. It began in London but has grown to a network of 16 cities across the world, focusing on cutting air pollution and enhancing public health. The programme brings together data, communities and city decision makers to cut air pollution, and it all started here.

But it’s not just ambition that local action is good for, it can also be a test bed for new policies, proving their success and demonstrating how they work before being rolled out at a bigger scale. We saw this with the £2 bus fare cap that began in Greater Manchester in 2022, before being rolled out England-wide by the national government to ease the cost of living. This is a policy that Burnham has recently promised to reinstate across the country next year. 

Specifically on air pollution, UK100’s new report, Breathing Life, shows that between 2019 and 2025, local authority clean air action prevented an estimated 13,722 attributable deaths, representing more than £14.9 billion in monetised benefit from all health impacts and productivity gains.

We can see the impact of local actions in places like Bradford, where after just one year of the clean air zone, GP visits for respiratory illnesses were down by a quarter, saving £30,700 a month in its first year. 

Our report, The Clean Air Dividend of Net Zero, produced by CBI Economics and WSP, which quantifies the health and economic air quality benefits of the UK’s Climate Change Committee's net zero pathway, adds another dimension to the importance of place. The analysis shows the fall in air pollution across the UK would generate £7.7 billion in productivity gains by 2050 from a healthier workforce. Although it highlights that London captures a disproportionate share of health and economic benefits because of its higher pollution levels, meaning the capital has the most to gain.

For local leaders, all these findings are hard to ignore when air quality action addresses public health, reduces inequalities and drives economic growth.

To maximise the benefits that local action brings, we’re proud to be supporting UK100 in creating a Strategic Authority air quality network, which ensures clean air strategies are embedded into strategic authority plans and priorities. The forum provides support and is a space to share learnings and knowledge of best practice around clean air. With devolution accelerating, we face both opportunity and complexity in the years to come, making networks like UK100’s only more important.