Investigating the impact of COVID-19 lockdown restrictions on odour complaints made to London Borough Councils in Spring 2020 compared to Spring 2019

ABSTRACT

This research explores the impact of the COVID-19 lockdown restrictions (working from home; not attending school; only socialising with people from your household), on the number of odour complaints made to London Borough Councils in Spring 2020. As odour has been linked to mental and physical health, this research is pertinent in the current blended working style many workplaces have adopted as a result of COVID-19. The area of Greater London was used to investigate the difference between odour complaints made to London Councils in Spring 2019 compared to those submitted during lockdown in Spring 2020. Using Freedom of Information requests, this project transformed raw data from 29 London Councils to reveal a statistically significant increase in the number of complaints made between the two years. A categorisation framework showed that complaints in the ‘Residential’ category rose pointedly. There were no strong trends between individual Borough data and no significant correlations between a range of urban, environmental, and demographic factors, suggesting that odour pollution impacts communities in a similar way across London. Utilising these findings, the project highlights some recommendations for Local Councils to improve working conditions at home and some avenues of further study for environmental researchers.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• odour pollution
• mental health
• wellbeing
• urban planning
• sustainable cities

This article is related to:

Research for city practice

Acknowledgements

Thank you to the London Borough Council FOI officers who responded promptly and sent useful data for this research.

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/23748834.2023.2298032

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Geo loc ation

University College London, London, United Kingdom.

Notes

1. Daily complaints data are available in the supplementary material.

2. The three remaining Inner London Boroughs did not supply data for this project.

3. All of the values used to calculate Spearman’s rank have been taken from the Greater London Authority website. All factors with no date are from 2020 and any that have a specific date next to them show the date of those data used in the calculations.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Harriet Barton

Harriet Barton research interests are at the intersection of cities, climate change, and health. She currently works on accelerating decarbonisation initiatives at city level, emphasising the positive health co-benefits of decarbonising. Her work investigates best practice examples of decarbonisation interventions from across the globe based on carbon reduction capacity as well as health and social benefits.