Clean Air Act 1956
Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom
The Clean Air Act 1956 (4 & 5 Eliz. 2. c. 52) was an act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom enacted principally in response to London's Great Smog of 1952. It was sponsored by the Ministry of Housing and Local Government in England and the Department of Health for Scotland, and was in effect until 1993.
The act introduced a number of measures to reduce air pollution. Primary among them was mandated movement toward smokeless fuels, especially in high-population "smoke control areas" to reduce smoke pollution and sulphur dioxide from household fires. The act also included measures that reduced the emission of gases, grit, and dust from chimneys and smoke-stacks.
The act was a significant milestone in the development of a legal framework to protect the environment. It was modified by later enactments, including the Clean Air Act 1968.
“Clean Air Act 1956” enters the record as act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Clean, Parliament and United can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Clean Air Act 1956” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Clean, Parliament and United provides the most credible route into that argument.
Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 28, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5130457. The first chronological checks are 1956, 1952, 1993 and 1968.
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This entry incorporates text from “Clean Air Act 1956” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.