Due to essential maintenance the HMO (mandatory or additional) and selective licensing forms and the Planning Register will be unavailable from 3pm on Wednesday 12 February, and all day on Thursday 13 February. We apologise for any inconvenience.
How we manage air quality in the city
Find out what we're doing to improve air quality in Brighton & Hove and view our local air quality reports
There are 50 sensors placed in various locations across Sussex, including 40 in Brighton & Hove, which:
measure nitric oxide, nitrogen dioxide, ozone and particulate matter
provide ambient measurements for temperature, pressure and relative humidity
Funded by a Defra air quality grant and the council’s Carbon Neutral Fund, the real-time sensors have been placed in a variety of locations to measure air quality in different environments.
The locations include:
local parks and the South Downs National Park
hill slopes and valley bottoms for comparison
outer areas, suburban and centrally located schools with or without school street schemes or other active travel initiatives
roadside on:
local A roads, B roads, and C roads
strategic trunk roads (A27 and A23)
Brighton & Hove city centre
near Shoreham and Newhaven ports
construction sites and potential development areas
an industrial site in West Sussex (Horsham)
12 Air Quality Management Areas (known as AQMAs), including 6 in Brighton & Hove and one in Newhaven
Air Quality Action Plan (AQAP)
The consultation on our draft AQAP has closed. Following public consultation the final report was approved by ETS committee on 15 November 2022. It included an amendment not to change the city's smoke control areas at this time.
Where an area is identified as at risk of non-compliance with legal limits of Nitrogen Dioxide (NO2), an Air Quality Action Plan is required.
Whilst we want to improve air quality citywide our legal requirement is to prioritise improvement in 6 Air Quality Management Areas (AQMAs). These were declared by the council in 2020, because monitoring and modelling showed a risk of non-compliance with toxic NO2 and therefore a risk to public health.
The plan includes evidence which identifies sources of emissions (gases and smoke) that impact most on life in the city. It outlines actions and priorities to improve air quality which will not only benefit residents and visitors to the city but also the wider Sussex region.
Progress on measures set out within this plan will be reported within the council’s annual status reports.
The Department for Food, Environment and Rural Affairs (Defra) have given £499,500 of funding. Additional funding from Brighton & Hove Buses means that we have a total of £676,000. This has been spent on making buses which operate in and around Brighton & Hove ‘super low emission’.
The Defra funding has been allocated to upgrade the exhausts of 52 buses with newer, cleaner parts. This will reduce the emissions they produce in Brighton & Hove and the wider Sussex area.
This work will be in addition to 100 buses already converted under similar schemes since 2014.
In 2018 and 2019 Brighton & Hove Buses also invested £17.8M in 54 hybrid buses. These buses are battery powered and zero emission when they travel through the city centre and AQMAs.
Additional funding for air quality monitoring
For 2024 we're leading a project with £376,800 of new Defra air quality funding. This project will improve air quality monitoring and provide information on pollution and behaviour across the county.
This fund will also raise awareness of:
the risks of pollution
the health benefits of cleaner air
emission free travel
It follows a joint bid to the national air quality grant, made between ourselves and other local councils across East and West Sussex.
The work to reduce air pollution and raise awareness will include working with taxi trade, events, and schools.
Brighton & Hove’s Carbon Neutral Fund has also been allocated to air monitoring projects.