Hythe Wood-Burner Pollution: Folkestone & Hythe District Council Challenged Over UCL Data

At Tuesday 3 March’s Overview & Scrutiny Committee, a revealing exchange played out over domestic wood burners and air quality in Hythe. Councillor Paul Thomas recalled a previous air-quality report and said Hythe had been “picked out as being an outlier”. Cabinet member Cllr Stephen Scoffham responded that the analysis was “very crude” because it was based on certificates issued when a wood burner was installed: it did not show what type of appliance was fitted, how efficient it was, or how often it was used. In his telling, the maps amounted to little more than a rough “density” measure.

 

On one level, that is an accurate description of what the underlying data can’t do. A dataset built from Energy Performance Certificates (EPCs) is not a live emissions meter. It does not record how many evenings the stove is lit, whether the wood is seasoned, whether the user slumbers the air vents, or whether smoke is drifting into a neighbour’s bedroom. It is also true that “wood burner” covers a messy reality: open fires, old stoves, and newer “eco-design” models are not the same thing.

But where Scoffham goes wrong is in using those caveats to imply the work is too crude to be meaningful. The University College London-led work is not a casual trawl of a handful of certificates. It is a large-scale, methodologically explicit attempt to map where appliances are likely to be — at fine geographic scale — using tens of millions of records, with statistical corrections for missing certificates and checks against other national datasets. In plain English: it is not perfect, but it is substantive, and it is good enough to change what a council chooses to do next.

WHAT THE UCL MAPS ACTUALLY ARE (AND WHY THEY MATTER)

The UCL-linked mapping that ShepwayVox previously highlighted uses EPC records across England and Wales to estimate the prevalence and concentration of properties recorded as having wood fuel or solid fuel as a heating source. EPCs exist because, since 2008, an EPC has been required at the point of build, sale, or private rental, and each certificate includes key property characteristics, including heating sources. That makes EPCs one of the few nationwide datasets that can be used to build a high-resolution picture of where wood-burning appliances cluster.

Crucially, the peer-reviewed research behind these maps does not pretend EPCs are a perfect census. It explicitly addresses the obvious problem — not every home has a current EPC — by comparing the EPC database to an address database of the national housing stock and then correcting estimates using Census-linked methods. It also evaluates the resulting “wood burner prevalence” measure against other official datasets, including emissions inventories and air-pollution monitoring data, to test whether the geographic patterns it produces make sense in the real world.

That is not “crude” in the ordinary meaning of the word. It is exactly how public-policy mapping is often done when you cannot legally or practically peer into people’s living rooms. You use the best available national proxy, quantify the uncertainty, correct where you can, and test whether the signal lines up with independent indicators.

In other words, Scoffham is right that the EPC approach does not tell you usage intensity, but wrong to suggest you “don’t actually learn a huge amount”. You learn where the risk of wood-smoke exposure is more likely to be concentrated, where public communications should be targeted, where monitoring should be improved, and where complaints and health concerns should be taken especially seriously.

WHY “DENSITY” IS NOT A SHOULDER-SHRUG

Scoffham’s defence boils down to this: Hythe has lots of people, and lots of people have wood burners, and you can see similar patterns in other coastal towns. That is precisely the point — density is the policy-relevant fact. A single stove in a remote hamlet is one thing; a high concentration of stoves in a compact town, in winter inversions, near schools, older residents, and busy roads, is another. Density is how local exposure risks scale, because the particles do not stay politely above the chimney pot and mind their own business.

This is where the “it might be an efficient stove” argument can become a distraction. Even modern stoves emit fine particles (PM2.5). Efficiency claims are not the same as “no health impact”, and they are certainly not the same as “no neighbourhood impact” in built-up areas. The question a council has to answer is not “could some appliances be better than others?” — it is “what is happening to population exposure in the places where these appliances are clustered, and what are we doing about it?”

And that takes us straight to what has happened nationally.

CLEANING UP OUR AIR: WHY WOOD SMOKE IS NOW A NATIONAL HEALTH ISSUE

This is not a niche hobby debate. The government’s own 10-year health plan says air pollution “causes the equivalent of between 26,000 and 38,000 deaths per year in England alone”, with working-class communities the most exposed to harm. To put that in human scale: Hythe ward’s population is 11,080 (mid 2024). The national annual death toll linked to air pollution is the equivalent of roughly 2.3 to 3.4 times everyone who lives in Hythe.

And it is not just traffic. The same plan flags emissions from domestic burning as “a major source” of harmful particulate pollution (PM2.5 — the tiny particles that get deep into the lungs), especially in urban areas. It also commits government to consult “later this year” on reducing emissions from domestic burning, and says Defra will refresh its ambition via a review of the air quality strategy, renegotiate an international emissions protocol, and review long-term PM2.5 targets. In other words: this is already a live policy and public-health agenda — which is exactly why councils should treat robust “where is it concentrated?” data as a prompt for action, not something to wave away, as Cllr Scoffham did on Tuesday night sat the Overview & Scrutiny Committee.

THE BMJ AND THE LEGAL THREATS: WHY THIS DEBATE HAS MOVED ON

This week, national reporting described how councils running public-health campaigns warning about wood-burner pollution have faced lobbying and legal threats from the stove industry’s trade body and supporters. The reporting references British Medical Journal (BMJ) work that used Freedom of Information requests to councils with high concentrations of wood burners, and found that a significant number had been lobbied or threatened over clean-air messaging.

The BMJ’s published figures also give a sense of scale locally. For Folkestone & Hythe, the BMJ dataset estimates a concentration of 15.4 stoves per km² across the district — around 5,644 stoves in total — equivalent to 16.4% of homes (roughly one in six).

You do not get legal threats over “crude” data that “doesn’t tell you much”. You get legal threats when the evidence is strong enough, and the public messaging effective enough, that it begins to change behaviour and policy. The industry’s own posture is a backhanded admission that the “density” maps and the wider health evidence are being taken seriously by public bodies.

For Folkestone & Hythe, there is an obvious local implication. When a cabinet member responsible for air quality downplays a nationally recognised mapping approach — at exactly the moment when medical, journalistic scrutiny and legal threats are escalating — it risks putting the council on the wrong side of both evidence and public expectation.

WHAT FOLKESTONE & HYTHE SHOULD DO NEXT (AND WHY IT FALLS SQUARELY INSIDE SCOFFHAM’S PORTFOLIO)

Cllr Scoffham’s – (pictured) –  cabinet brief  spans climate, environment and biodiversity and includes recycling, coastal protection and strategy, contaminated land, air quality, and water. If you accept that air quality is a core responsibility — and it is — then dismissing a major national dataset as “crude” is not a neutral comment. It is a signal about his and the Council’s priorities.

There is a sensible, evidence-led way to handle this without panic or grandstanding:

First, stop treating the EPC mapping as an embarrassment to be explained away. Treat it as a screening tool: it helps identify where additional monitoring, targeted advice, and enforcement attention are most justified.

Second, pair the mapping with better local measurement. If the council believes Hythe is being unfairly “picked out”, the answer is not to wave away the data; it is to measure PM2.5 properly (including where people actually live, walk, and go to school) by using s34 of the Clean Air Act 1993, publish the results clearly, and link them to practical actions.

Third, be honest with residents about what modern stoves do and do not do. “Eco-design” is not a magic spell. The public deserves straight talk: wood smoke contains fine particles; fine particles harm health; density increases neighbourhood exposure; and individual choices aggregate into population-level outcomes.

Finally, treat this as a public-health issue, not just a lifestyle argument about cosy flames. That means joining up air-quality work with housing, health inequalities, and support for people who genuinely rely on solid fuel — while still discouraging non-essential burning in built-up areas where it externalises harm.

Hythe residents do not need a council that tells them they “don’t learn a huge amount” from the best national proxy data available. They need a council that says: this is what the evidence suggests; this is what we can and can’t conclude; and this is what we’re going to do about it.

Because the one thing we can say with confidence is this: if you are the cabinet member responsible for air quality, and your default stance is to downgrade inconvenient evidence to “crude”, you are not protecting the public from bad science. You are protecting the status quo from scrutiny.

The Shepway Vox Team

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