Clean air is crucial for creating healthy urban environments where people live and work, both today and in the future. Enhancing air quality reduces the adverse effects of Nitrogen Dioxide (NO2) pollutants on human health and fosters better living and working conditions.

As set out in Defra’s 2019 Clean Air Strategy, transport is a significant source of air pollution. The immediate air quality challenge is to reduce NO2 emissions in the areas where concentrations of these harmful gases currently exceed legal limits.

The UK Government has overall responsibility for meeting air quality standards. Defra in partnership with DfT has lead responsibility for meeting these targets. They setup the Joint Air Quality Unit (JAQU) to deliver the Government’s NO2 reduction strategies with levers for action shared across Government departments, as well as Local Authorities (LAs). Strong cooperation and collaboration between these stakeholder communities is critical to tackling air pollution effectively.

The CAZ service is a world class example of policy-led digital transformation that effectively showcases how technology and policy can be aligned to improve environmental sustainability. By enabling citizens and businesses to understand and manage CAZ charges, the service is contributing to positive behaviour change and is reducing NO2 pollution in UK cities.

As a result of collaborative and agile working, the ‘Drive in a Clean Air Zone’ service has realised several significant achievements:

• Encouraged significant public uptake by adopting a user-centred design approach based on face-to-face research, iterative prototyping, and development to ensure that user needs were met as effectively as possible. This also catered for users with assisted digital needs.
• Allowed JAQU/DVLA to benefit from a cloud first and ‘buy don’t build’ technical strategy. Delivery was accelerated, de-risked, cost effective (due to the cost elasticity inherent in cloud computing). Currently, the service reliably processes over 30k transactions per day and can scale to 10x this as new CAZs launch.
• Allowed JAQU/DVLA to secure a wealth of operational data that they can use to evaluate, inform, and optimise the implementation of clean air policy, now and in the future.

The successful launch of Clean Air Zones in Bath, Birmingham, Portsmouth, Bradford, Bristol, Tyneside, and Sheffield attests to the service's scalability and impact. The approach and success hold promise for adoption world-wide. A DL Impact award win would position this service as a global leader in digital innovation for cleaner and healthier cities.