The Council has three key areas of responsibility on air Quality.

The Environmental Protection Act 1990 requires the Council to investigate allegations of statutory nuisance.  These allegations may be made by any member of the public and relate to smoke or smells that emanate from a property and detrimentally affect residents to an unreasonable extent.  Where the Council finds a statutory nuisance to be in existence it is under duty to pursue formal abatement of the nuisance if the matter cannot be resolved informally.  The Council receives in excess of two hundred complaints each year about alleged statutory nuisances concerning air pollution.

The Pollution Prevention and Control Act 1999 requires the Council to permit and regulate certain industrial installations to control their emissions to atmosphere and to keep public registers of details about the installations.  Huntingdonshire District Council has about fifty such installations in its administrative area, which it regularly inspects in accordance with Government targets.  Additional public registers are held for installations regulated by the Environment Agency.

The Environment Act 1995 obliges the Council to continually review and assess air quality generally and this process involves air quality monitoring and pollutant dispersion modelling to ensure that traffic and industrial pollutants do not put public health at risk.  Annual reports on air quality are submitted to the Government and made available to interested parties and the public.  All the Councils Air Quality Review and Assessment Reports are available online to the right.