Clean Air Day 2025 – A Breath of Fresh Air in Blackpool

This Clean Air Day we are shining a light on some of the great work being done by environmental health teams to take action to improve air quality in their communities and to engage the public on this critical area of work.

In Blackpool, the environmental health team took the lead on a project to develop a policy which outlines Blackpool’s Council’s comprehensive approach to managing and investigating smoke and open fire nuisance complaints.

The policy, ‘A Breath of Fresh Air: Outdoor and Chimney Fires Clean Air Policy’, published in November 2024, aligns with the council’s wider Air Quality Strategy and aims to improve local air quality and reduce public health risks.

It is a great example of the benefits of partnership working and Jennifer Clayton, CIEH member and Head of Public Protection and Enforcement at Blackpool Council, spoke to CIEH all about it.

Background to the project

As part of Blackpool’s Air Quality Action Plan, Blackpool Council committed to producing an Outdoor and Chimney Fires Clean Air Policy.

The policy incorporates a multi-agency initiative with its partners, Public Health, Lancashire Fire and Rescue and Lancashire Police to create a coordinated approach to managing open air fire-related complaints and ensuring public safety.

Jennifer Clayton and the Council’s Environmental Protection (EP) team predominantly led on developing the policy and she explained what problem it was looking to solve.

“As far as Blackpool's concerned, we've got a really strong working relationship with police and fire colleagues, but we had issues around information sharing,” Jennifer said.

“Say for instance, the fire service went to a fire in open land and there was burning of tyres or something like that, then that report wasn't coming specifically through to us. If someone made a complaint about it, we may hear about it, but otherwise we weren't aware of it.

“Also, all Lancashire Fire and Rescue pumps have CCTV cameras on them now so obviously from our perspective, if we can request that CCTV footage, that helps in our investigation and any actions that we potentially might take against the landowner or the person who's responsible for the fire.

“We're quite lucky in Blackpool because we're a coastal town, we do have good air quality anyway. However, sometimes when the wind's blowing the wrong direction, from inland to outland, it can really affect our air quality monitoring, so we wanted to come up with a way to deal with those issues better and just to make the community aware that we are on it and we do talk to each other.

“I utilised our partnership working and brought the fire service and the police on board and because we're a unitary authority we have our own public health department, so it was important to bring them on board as well for them to ensure that we're getting a grip of the issue.”

Early days, but positive signs

With the policy being published in November last year to coincide with Bonfire Night, new processes and ways of working have been put in place which are already starting to pay dividends.

“The new process of dealing with smoke related complaints is that an officer is deployed pretty much immediately, so they can go and witness it straight away,” Jennifer said.

“We wanted to do this as we were finding was that the complaints were coming in but then, because Blackpool is so busy, the officers weren't getting out to it for one or two days and by then the evidential test is gone and we've not got any evidence.

“The senior officer in the EP team monitors the jobs that come in and if a burning off job comes in, they try and deploy one straight away.

“Obviously, there are going to be times we can't get someone out immediately due to demand for various reasons, but we do try and get out to them straight away so at least the officer can witness it at the time.

“Following the implementation of the policy, smoke complaints have certainly gone down; the fire service sharing their intelligence with us a little bit more has definitely helped.

“There is a little bit more work to do on that just ensuring that everyone's aware of the process and things are coming through to us faster, but it’s certainly improving all the time.”

Collaborating is the key

Jennifer is clear in advising other environmental health teams who may be at the start of their own journey with similar policies or projects, that developing relationships with other partner organisations is crucial.

“We wouldn't be able to do it without those strong relationships with partners,” Jennifer confirmed. “As far as Blackpool Council's multi-agency team is anyway, we've won national awards for the way we work together so it is like our bread and butter. We work really, really closely with our partners every single day.

“It helps that we’re located in the same office as the police, so particularly if there are issues with anti-social behaviour in the town centre, for example, we tend to go out together to deal with it.

“One of my priorities is stakeholder engagement. I've been here for 20 years, so I've got well-established relationships with a lot of our partners, as have all my managers as well.

“It's just keeping those stakeholders engaged, keeping those communication channels open as at the end of the day, and sharing the toolkit between us to see who can deal with certain incidents the best way.

“Sometimes it’s the fire service, sometimes it's the police and sometimes it's us. But if you don't have those communication channels open, then it just goes under the radar.”

View ‘A Breath of Fresh Air: Outdoor and Chimney Fires Clean Air Policy’ here: https://www.cieh.org/media/0mpezc0u/a-breath-of-fresh-air-outdoor-and-chimney-fires-clean-air-policy-nov-24.pdf