UK ministers have been told to "come clean" on when they were first told about the Volkswagen scandal.
Labour's shadow transport secretary Lilian Greenwood claimed the response of the Department for Transport (DfT) was "unacceptable".
Environmental group Greenpeace wrote to the Government to ask if it knew about the cheating of emissions tests before this month.
The action against Volkswagen in the US began with diesel emissions research by the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT) in 2013 and 2014 which found a huge discrepancy in real-world performance and official laboratory tests.
Transport Secretary Patrick McLoughlin announced yesterday that diesel cars would be re-tested in the UK.
Ms Greenwood said: "Ministers must come clean and admit when they were first told about the diesel emissions scandal.
"The International Council on Clean Transportation, the body which helped to expose the problem, warned a year ago that dangerously high levels of nitrogen oxide emissions were not confined to America.
"It is unacceptable that the Government waited this long to take action."
Greenpeace published figures which it claimed show manufacturers of diesel vehicles built to comply with European emissions standards spent up to £13.6 million lobbying EU politicians last year.
Its UK executive director, John Sauven, said: "It's time for our ministers to be completely transparent on what they knew and when about the pollution fix scandal.
"Many people will want to know which matters more to our government - the polluters' profits or the health of their citizens."
A DfT spokesman said the UK Government has been "at the forefront of action at a European level" to introduce updated emissions testing.
He added that the ICCT report published in October last year "did not identify the vehicles tested".
VW has admitted that 11 million vehicles worldwide were fitted with sophisticated software which conned testers in the US into believing their vehicles met environmental standards.
The Environmental Protection Agency said 482,000 of the German car-maker's 2009-15 models in the US were fitted with the defeat device to switch engines to a cleaner mode when they are undergoing official emissions testing.
Once on the road, the cars produced nitrogen oxide pollutants at up to 40 times the legal standard.
VW has not revealed whether cars in the UK are affected but Germany's transport minister, Alexander Dobrindt, said 2.8 million vehicles in his country have the software.
He added that VW vans as well as cars are caught up in the scandal.
Mr McLoughlin said on Thursday that the Government was taking the ''unacceptable actions of VW extremely seriously''.
He announced that the UK regulator would investigate and re-run laboratory tests and called on the EU to conduct a Europe-wide investigation to find out if cars have been fitted with defeat devices on the continent.
The British Lung Foundation urged the Government to commit to "routine, independent real-world testing on all cars".
Volkswagen chief executive Martin Winterkorn resigned over the emissions scandal but insisted he was not aware of "any wrongdoing on my part''.
According to reports the 68-year-old could receive a severance package of up to two years of his annual salary, which would be worth over £22 million.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here