Bath’s Clean Air Zone

Cleaner, healthier air for Bath is on the horizon!

Bath’s clean air zone is now live. It will be charging most higher emission vehicles to drive in central Bath, except private cars and motorbikes. For more information on the boundary, charges and the support available, please go to www.bathnes.gov.uk/BathCAZ. If you have a specific question, please email CAZ_info@bathnes.gov.uk or call the CAZ team on 01225 396189.

Air Quality Management Areas in Bath and North East Somerset:

There are 5 Air Quality Management Areas (AQMAs) in Bath and North East Somerset (B&NES) where levels of nitrogen dioxide exceed the national annual average objective of 40 micrograms per cubic metre (µg/m³). The AQMA maps and Air Quality Action Plan documents are linked to in the table below:

Bath's Clean Air Plan

The Bath Air Quality Management Area has been in place since 2002. Traffic growth coupled with the growing proportion of diesel vehicles as a result of government incentives have meant that action plans have struggled to reduce nitrogen dioxide sufficiently to meet national objectives.

In 2017, the Government's own modelling predicted that Bath would be exceeding the EU annual average limit value (40 µg/m³) in 2020 and as a result, a Direction was served on Bath and North East Somerset Council to produce a Clean Air Plan to meet the 40 µg/m³ annual average by 2021 at the latest. The Direction provides a welcome opportunity to lower concentrations of nitrogen dioxide, as development and implementation of the Clean Air Plan is funded by Central Government.

Go to the Bath Breathes webpages for more information.

Monitoring

For details of our monitoring go to the Monitoring page. 

Live air quality data can be found here.

A map of the diffusion tube monitoring locations can be found here.

B&NES air quality data can be found within our reports.

Information on the Bath Smoke Control Area is available on the Smoke Control page.