Wood burning: government failings

January 2024

Our new research reveals the inadequacy of the Government’s legislation in tackling air pollution from wood burning. Only three fines have been handed out in Smoke Control Areas since Jan 2022, despite 10,000 complaints.

Freedom of Information requests submitted by us to local authorities with Smoke Control Areas in England have revealed that only one prosecution and three fines have been issued in nearly two years for illegal wood burning, despite councils receiving over 10,600 complaints.

New measures were introduced by the Government in May 2022 as part of the Environment Act to deal with domestic burning, but just a handful of councils have used these provisions to manage wood burning complaints since they came into force. Two-thirds of the 10,647 complaints were not followed up at all and there is confusion about the powers available, with 80 local authorities stating they are not using the new measures on wood burning.

Despite promises in the Environment Improvement Plan nearly a year ago to reduce the limit that wood burning stoves are allowed to emit in Smoke Control Areas from 5g of smoke per hour to a maximum of 3g, the Government has still not introduced legislation.

We have written to the environmental watchdog, the Office for Environmental Protection, to investigate the failure of these legal provisions to bring about any reduction in the harm to people’s health.

Defra funded advertisements

Further to this, we also recently uncovered the fact that the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) are paying social media influencers to promote their ‘Burn Better’ campaign.

The influencers’ adverts suggest that using the right fuel, sweeping your chimney and servicing your stove are all you need to do to reduce emissions. Yet even new stoves used in this way emit huge amounts of air pollution, with Ecodesign stoves emitting 450 times as much fine particle pollution (PM2.5) as a gas boiler. As the adverts do not explain this, this campaign is very misleading to the public: Defra is effectively paying people to promote wood burning. At the same time, it is funding local authorities in London to use much stronger messaging over its health impacts.

This is a failure on the part of Defra to explain the real truth about air pollution from burning wood to the general public, with parallels to the Dieselgate scandal.

Head to our campaign page to read more about the air pollution and health impacts of wood burning.