Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Committee
Oral evidence: Public Parks: Follow Up, HC 327
Wednesday 20 July 2022
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 20 July 2022.
Members present: Mr Clive Betts; Bob Blackman; Sara Britcliffe; Darren Henry; Kate Hollern.
Questions 1 - 45
Witnesses
I: Cllr Gerald Vernon-Jackson CBE, Chair of the Sports, Culture and Tourism Board, Local Government Association; Peter Neal, Independent Consultant and Planning Expert; Drew Bennellick, Head of Land and Nature Policy UK, National Lottery Heritage Fund; Ellie Robinson, Head of Urban Green Space, National Trust.
II: Helen Griffiths, Chief Executive, Fields in Trust; Alan Law, Deputy Chief Executive, Natural England; Dave Morris, Chair, National Federation of Parks and Green Spaces.
Dave Morris, in Questions 30-31, refers to a report that can be found here.
Witnesses: Gerald Vernon-Jackson, Peter Neal, Drew Bennellick and Ellie Robinson.
Chair: Good morning, everyone. Welcome to this session of the Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Committee. This morning, we have a session with two panels of witnesses to look at public parks. We did an inquiry as a Committee back in 2017 and made a number of recommendations. We are doing a follow-up this morning to see what progress, if any, has been made since that time five years ago, on the recommendations we made. At the time, we had more public involvement with that inquiry—I think over 13,000 individuals connected with it in some way—than any other inquiry we have ever done. It showed the extent to which the public value their parks and want to see them maintained and thriving.
I will begin the session this morning by putting on record the interests that individual members may have with regard to the inquiry. I am a vice-president of the Local Government Association. I am also a trustee of Fields in Trust and the chief executive, Helen Griffiths, is a witness on the second panel, so I will put that on the record right at the beginning.
Kate Hollern: I employ a councillor in my office.
Sara Britcliffe: I employ a councillor and have family members who are councillors.
Darren Henry: I employ a councillor in my office.
Q1 Chair: Bob Blackman will be joining us shortly. I know he is a vice‑president of the LGA and I think he employs councillors as well. He has declared that on previous occasions.
Now we come to our witnesses. We have two present in the room with us and both other witnesses online.
Drew Bennellick: Good morning. I am Drew Bennellick. I am head of land and nature policy at the National Lottery Heritage Fund.
Peter Neal: I am Peter Neal. I am a landscape architect and environmental planner, a fellow of the Landscape Institute and an independent consultant. I focus particularly on urban parks and the public realm. I have undertaken research in planning, design, funding and management, both in the UK and abroad, on the subject. I worked on the Olympic Park and served with the Mayor of London’s London Green Spaces Commission.
Ellie Robinson: Good morning. I am Ellie Robinson. I am the head of urban green spaces at the National Trust.
Gerald Vernon-Jackson: Good morning. I am Gerald Vernon‑Jackson. I am leader of Portsmouth City Council and chair of the LGA culture, tourism and sport board.
Q2 Chair: All four of you are very welcome. We did our report and made a lot of recommendations back in 2017. We had a great deal of involvement from those involved in running parks, those involved in using parks and the public in general. It seems that we are back to discussing the same issues over again. Have we not made any progress? The Government set up a Parks Action Group at the time. Has that not achieved very much?
Drew Bennellick: We were grateful to be invited to join the Parks Action Group. Certainly Heritage Fund attended a lot of those very early meetings. We had some good constructive discussions. The Parks Action Group was in two parts. There was the Government Departments bit of it and then the other part of it, which was predominantly other agencies and organisations with an interest in urban green space. We had some very good discussions early on.
One of the ambitions around the group was to get that cross-Government departmental focus on urban green space. I will talk about urban green space more than parks. That was very successful in bringing together Defra, DCMS, BEIS and other Departments. Unfortunately, probably due to the lack of resources within MHCLG—and I think that there was quite a bit of staff turnover at the time—we struggled. Quite often, we had different staff attending different meetings. MHCLG did not really have the resource to take forward some of the actions.
We produced two really good documents, one around skills in parks and one around presenting a business case for parks. They were really good pieces of work, primarily led by the charities and other organisations around the table, but those documents were not published for quite a long time. I am not sure what impact they ended up having, which is very frustrating. Heritage Fund has picked up the skills work, which was primarily led by APSE, very well, and has been feeding that into Defra, which is doing some work around a skills strategy at the moment. There is a sense of frustration that the Parks Action Group could have really helped. If we are looking at going forward, some kind of combined vision across Government for the role and the future of urban green space is needed.
Peter Neal: I concur. I did not partake in the Parks Action Group, but from the sector there was a level of disappointment that it was not as prominent in its outcomes and achievements as perhaps it could have been. However, a range of the funding was most welcome. The alignment with some of the levelling-up funding, the pocket park funding, the support for the accelerator programme and the work on the skills programme are all achievements, although there could have been a stronger set of objectives or outcomes for the Parks Action Group, perhaps, to crystallise its effectiveness.
However, looking more broadly, the challenge of funding and managing parks still exists. It has been a challenge for decades. There have been opportunities since we last met on testing and trialling new models, as we will perhaps explore in this session, which are very constructive.
We are also now viewing parks through the lens of the pandemic. We further appreciate the value that those parks have provided to communities throughout the country in the way they have provided space for health and recreation through the challenges of the last two years. That is a very significant point of reflection, which has further highlighted the value of parks that was very evident in the evidence given previously.
Ellie Robinson: I too sat on the Parks Action Group with Drew and many others. I agree with everything Drew said. To add a further couple of reflections, within Government this agenda has not been a priority. Other things have come along in the last few years that have taken up the capacity and the time. Whether it is a political or departmental priority, we have not really seen evidence of that.
The Parks Action Group was doing the Government’s work for them outside of normal due process. I do not think that there was ever any buy-in from the Department to what it was trying to do or to the conclusions, the advice and the work that the Parks Action Group did. Going forward, the levelling-up agenda and its focus on pride in place, the Government’s plans around net zero and climate resilience, and the Government’s 25‑year environment plan all have really important hooks for the role of urban green spaces, including parks.
Going forward, the framing, as Drew said, is really important. If we think more broadly about urban green spaces and infrastructure, as Peter referenced, the pandemic and now the heatwave show that these spaces are essential infrastructure for successful towns and cities, and for community wellbeing, not a “nice to have”. There is something to say about how we rewire these objectives and priorities across Government. That is still very much work to do, I am sorry to say. We are really grateful for you spotlighting this and having an update now. It is very timely.
Q3 Chair: Are you saying something like the Parks Action Group that connected into the levelling-up agenda and tried to look particularly at the value of parks, green open spaces and green infrastructure as part of that process would be of value?
Ellie Robinson: I am not suggesting that we reinvigorate the Parks Action Group. That was very much something from 2017. No, I am saying that the Government have hooks in their current policy agenda to reposition the role of parks and green spaces. They will have to have really good stakeholder engagement to be bringing in multiple perspectives.
There is something really important about having a greater voice for local government. They did not have a big enough voice on the Parks Action Group and a lot of them have been doing really pioneering and great work. It would be essential for the Government to listen to that directly in terms of the frontline changes that are required, but also within the incentives framework for local government and how they can fund this long term. These structural, systemic changes have still not happened. Until they do happen, it is incredibly hard for local government to plan ahead with any sort of security on this agenda.
Q4 Chair: We will come on to funding in a minute. Councillor Vernon-Jackson, responding to the last report in respect of the Parks Action Group, what has happened and what has not? There is your hook: local government was not involved enough in these discussions.
Gerald Vernon-Jackson: We run 27,000 parks and urban green spaces. Councils have been running them for 150 years. They are probably going to be running them for another 150 years. The pandemic has shown the incredible value of parks and open spaces to people.
One of my big disappointments with the Parks Action Group is the lack of involvement from the Department of Health and Social Care. There are enormous health issues and mental health issues in terms of open spaces. Realistically, in terms of councils’ funding, I have been doing council budgets in Portsmouth for 20 years and I have knocked over £100 million out of our budgets, under Governments of all colours. It is not a party political thing at all. Increasingly, councils are just becoming social services units. Everything else has to go. I cannot say, “We will not take that child into care because we don’t have any money.” That just cannot happen. Discretionary spending like parks and everything else gets sacrificed for social services and will continue to be.
Q5 Kate Hollern: The Government announced in February the creation of a £30 million parks fund, alongside the £9 million levelling-up parks fund. APSE has suggested funding has been small-scale, sporadic and only accessed by costly bidding systems that take little account of local need. We will go to the LGA first. Would you agree with that assessment?
Gerald Vernon-Jackson: Overall, yes. Things where we have to bid for things mean you have to put a lot of effort and money into bidding, as opposed to putting the money into long-term sustainable things. The need for funding is for long-term funding to be able to do what is necessary, year in, year out, not trying to do flash things that Ministers and civil servants think are fun, because they can come and launch them. We need sustainable funding.
We are having to make decisions about not cutting hedges as often. That is not covered by any bidding thing that I can bid into to ask, “Can we cut our hedges as we used to?” It is the bit that is the bane of all governments. It is short term; it is not long-term funding that keeps things going and funds the base budgets, which is what the pressure is on all of us. You might get a nice headline in the paper, but we need sustainable funding to do this year in, year out, day in, day out.
Q6 Kate Hollern: Would you agree that areas of most need are likely to lose out under this system?
Gerald Vernon-Jackson: I do not know. The people who are good at bidding bid well and get lots of money from lots of different things. People who are not good at bidding lose out. They are not always connected with disadvantage. Some councils are really good, even if they are looking after areas of great poverty.
Liverpool is really good at bidding for money. The ones that worry me are the small-scale district councils, often in rural areas. What works in Liverpool should also work in Barnstaple in north Devon, but North Devon Council probably does not have the capacity to do bidding and therefore always loses out.
Ellie Robinson: I agree with APSE that the funding is wholly inadequate. The pocket parks fund was designed for community spaces and it is not really getting anywhere close to tackling the core systemic issues that Councillor Vernon-Jackson has raised.
We did a report at the beginning of the pandemic that looked at the investment required to level up access to green space. That looked at the poorest, most deprived areas of the country, both socioeconomically and in terms of access to green space, and the scale of investment needed. Over a 10-year period, it was about £5.5 billion of investment that was needed. That would have created physical health and mental wellbeing benefits of £200 billion. These are core services and assets for community wellbeing and inward investment into cities and towns.
We know where those deprived areas are. Natural England has a great dataset using Government data. We have analysed that ourselves to look at what is needed in terms of levelling up. We can share that report with you. We have now looked at what that looks like in a suite of different types of towns and cities.
As Peter referenced earlier, the economics around this is really good, but that is not being translated for green infrastructure and green spaces to be a core part of the Government’s infrastructure investment. It does not feature in the national infrastructure strategy or the national infrastructure bank. When it comes to the big place-based pots of funding, it is a very fragmented picture. As Councillor Vernon-Jackson was saying, councils have to spend a lot of staff capacity bidding. It is a very inefficient process and a waste of public money. It is all fragmented; it is short term. It does not allow any council to properly have a strategic overview and long-term plan.
It would be really helpful to understand from Government what their plans are for the £30 million you referenced that was announced in the levelling-up White Paper. We have not heard anything further about that. It could be really important in demonstrating a very new way to finance the tackling of inequality across city green spaces for those who most need it. We would love to see the Government be really targeted about how they use that money and to be leveraging it to create a much bigger pot, more like £90 million to £100 million over the next few years, to drive some change. We can send you some further information on all that. We do not know about that £30 million. It would be really helpful for you to ask the Government about that.
Kate Hollern: That is really useful.
Peter Neal: The £39 million and the £9.7 million are always welcome. Funding for parks is essential as part of our community infrastructure. It is always welcome. However, the scale of that level of investment needs to be put into perspective, when you consider that it will often cost between £2 million and £5 million to restore a historic park. That level of funding is welcome but has a limited impact in the challenge for funding parks.
Also, looking at funding, the split between capital investment and revenue is always the challenge. There are two types of capital. One is for building new parks where we need them. The pandemic has shown inequalities of provision and some of that funding should go to invest where there is a real shortage and deficiency of parks. There is also capital for restoring parks. There has been the benefit of significant funding from the lottery—more than £1 billion over the last 20 years—which complements that funding.
On the revenue side, you need substantial funding for the day-to-day management. You also need funding on revenue to programme parks in order to make them serve communities with activities, events and other services that parks can provide. When one is looking at funding, one wants to understand the type of funding and the purpose that you are trying to achieve with that funding.
Q7 Kate Hollern: Of course, you need regular funding going forward for maintenance.
Peter Neal: Yes, for the revenue funding, which is the big challenge, and the Local Government Association has highlighted that point already.
Drew Bennellick: As Peter said, the National Lottery has invested over £1 billion now over the last 25 years in restoring historic parks—so that is over 900 parks restored. On average, it is £1.6 million per park, so £30 million, as you will see, probably does not go very far when you are talking England-wide.
At the Parks Action Group, we had discussion about the pocket parks programme. Generally, the Parks Action Group’s view was that pocket parks were not a good way forward, because of the amount of effort that was needed from local authorities to deliver that money on the ground. Certainly, when Heritage Fund is investing, we always invest on the basis of an evaluation of our work. We have done several evaluations of our parks programme and I am not aware of any evaluation of the pocket parks programme, or at least I could not find anything on websites. Learning from what has been done before is really critical in how you are going to invest.
As Ellie mentioned there, the key thing with that £30 million is how we can leverage that better. Heritage Fund is always interested in working in partnership to look at how we can leverage that £30 million to make it go further. We estimate that the £9 million we have so far invested in our future parks programme has leveraged about another £35 million across the programme and in those places. Working on that basis, it should be possible to leverage considerably more with that £30 million. We would need to work closely with DLUHC to work out how we might be able to effectively do that.
The last thing I was going to say is that the National Lottery was set up to fund projects. I know that is a weakness, in that that is what we do. We fund projects; we do something and move on. The reason we have so much interest in this agenda is not just that spending lottery money on parks is a really good way of getting the money down to the people on the ground, the people who really matter and those people who buy tickets.
Also, that £1 billion that is invested, plus all the money that came in to match that from the local authorities, is sat out there at the moment. We know, from the work that has been done recently on the 2021 state of parks report by APSE and Community First Partnership, that we still have large numbers of parks declining. Local authorities are predicting over the next three years that about 30% of parks will decline. Part of our interest is, exactly as Councillor Vernon-Jackson was saying there, around how we can get more money into this part of the sector. How can we work to leverage more pots of money from different sources? That is a key interest for us.
Kate Hollern: These resources are getting stretched in so many areas. As you say, the headline looks good, but it can be very difficult.
Q8 Darren Henry: In 2017, the Committee recommended that the Government’s cross-departmental group work with local authorities to develop innovative models for parks management and funding. I will ask this to Councillor Gerald to start with. How far has innovation come since 2017 and are more parks taking this up?
Gerald Vernon-Jackson: Inevitably, Covid has walloped us. It has changed life. It is the biggest public health emergency this country has ever seen and that, inevitably, causes problems. We have looked at different ways of trying to run parks, with volunteers or whatever, but those groups come and go. The base of trying to look after public open spaces is that you have to do it year in, year out.
There are big concerns and I know that the LGA’s view is that the gap between what councils currently provide and the funding available next year is £3.6 billion. That is inevitably going to mean more cuts into the parks budgets.
As for trying to find different groups of volunteers and organisations to run things, I am not sure that I have seen that working in large areas. It works on one-offs occasionally, but not in most places. The most successful thing is probably passing them down to parishes and town councils. Because those councils are not rate capped, they are able to do them in a more sustainable way. That works only in predominantly rural areas, where you have them. In Portsmouth, we do not have town and parish councils. There are some changes, but the basis is that public open space is public open space, and it is looked after by public bodies on behalf of the public.
Peter Neal: I talked briefly about the types of capital and revenue funding. There are different models to support each of those particular needs. The park funding challenge needs to be placed within the broader context of sustainable development and greening our towns and cities, providing essential environmental and social infrastructure. It is not just serving individual parks but making sure our cities, towns and neighbourhoods are greener, more resilient and more biodiverse to meet all the challenges that are very evident, particularly with climate change and the need for resilience on that. The funding for that should embrace those objectives beyond just the pure requirement of day-to-day management. It is about investing strategically in the green infrastructure of our towns and cities.
There are opportunities through traditional funding, but also through associated funding models that can draw in charitable funding, particularly through trusts or conservancies. They provide an ability to support local authority funding by bringing together a charitable trust and a local parks authority structure, in the way that the US uses parks conservancies, to generate additional funding in order to support and complement local authority funding. Trusts, and potentially endowments, have an important role to play going forwards.
The green finance sector is really interesting. That has gathered pace in the last three to four years, with carbon offsetting, biodiversity credits, social impact bonds and environmental impact bonds. There are additional ways to support the funding of parks and green spaces as our green infrastructure beyond, but to complement, local authority funding. There is a range of mechanisms that can be used and different structures as well.
Q9 Darren Henry: That is quite comprehensive. I have seen the nods there from some of the other people on the panel. Ellie and Drew, how are sustainable solutions and learning from the future parks accelerator initiative being shared and disseminated?
Ellie Robinson: For the benefit of other Committee members, the National Lottery Heritage Fund and National Trust set up the future parks accelerator after your last inquiry, partly in response to the whole range of issues raised, and to put some capacity and funding behind a group of leading local authorities that wanted to pioneer and find solutions on all the issues that Peter has just raised. The answer around new funding models is about blending all those different sources of funding, particularly to crack the maintenance challenge that we know all councils face.
You asked about sharing the learning. We are coming to the end now of the three-year programme. We have a major conference for local government from 17 to 19 October. The purpose of that is to share the learning, to produce resources that are practically useful for lots of other councils, to share what has worked and how to lead for change, and to have critical sessions to help upskill different teams within councils on different bits of this agenda. This is not just for a parks department to solve anymore.
There is an absolutely essential role for public health, for those working on flood risk and nature-based solutions to climate change, and for those looking at green skills and jobs. There are actually some really big prizes out there. To be able to get them, we need to help local government set itself up in a different way. That requires an investment in their capacity and the headspace to lead for this. There is definitely a really critical role for the voluntary sector, but it is in partnership with local government; it is not instead of. That is a big capacity-building requirement.
If we can give communities the power to shape and change their local places for the better, it helps people feel positive in the light of climate change, having greener, more resilient neighbourhoods, much nicer places to live, and safer places for children to grow up. We can see in the heat this week that tree cover is often under 5% in the poorest neighbourhoods. In the wealthiest, leafiest suburbs, it is 40% to 50%. There is a real inequality of how green space and green infrastructure benefits communities or not.
The room for investing in that is very significant, if we are looking at the widest range of budgets that are available for achieving that change. We have to move away from the annual maintenance model that we have got from the past, because, as Councillor Vernon-Jackson said, that is getting gobbled up by the budget to look after vulnerable adults and children. If we want much greener towns and cities, we need to set up a very different model to do that.
The future parks accelerator cities and towns have all been looking at this as a local, bespoke solution for their place, their communities, their opportunities and challenges. There are some very strong commonalities that we can be pulling together. Between them, they have a really interesting toolkit that is relevant for any place in the UK. That is what we are going to start to share in October. They are not at the end of their journey. They are in the middle and about to move into a big implementation phase.
There is a lot of exciting opportunity, but it requires that investment in their capacity to lead for change. It will not happen when somebody is struggling with a sparse workforce, firefighting, whether that is frontline or at management level. Since your inquiry, not only have we seen annual maintenance budgets cut back even further, but the staff base and capacity of local government have significantly reduced as well. There are a whole set of issues that need solving, but we are not going to do that by tinkering around the edges. We need to grip this and have a much more purposeful way of trying to solve it for the next generation.
Drew Bennellick: Back in 2014, Heritage Fund realised that there was very little innovation going on in the parks world. When I say “innovation”, I mean systemic change-type innovation. Parks managers and parks management staff are brilliant at coming up with new ways of doing things. We wondered whether there were new models or funding mechanisms that could be explored.
We did a Rethinking Parks programme with the innovation charity Nesta and that led to a lot of work around parks foundations. In Scotland, they have really advanced thinking about using urban green space for creating renewable energy. We have also looked at data. We have looked at a whole load of things. We have looked at digital giving for parks.
That was our first foray into innovation. It taught us, as Ellie has said there, that something at a much bigger scale was needed. Following the last inquiry, that is when Ellie and I put our heads together and came up with the future parks idea. For Heritage Fund, we have invested around £9 million. We could have spent that on three major park restorations. Instead, we decided to work with the National Trust across eight large areas—we are talking cities or counties—to support them and give them the headspace to rethink the way their parks are funded and managed.
As Ellie said, it is three years later and it has been hard work supporting those places. They are doing their day job as well as trying to think out of the box, as it were. There is some really exciting stuff emerging. I would urge you to go back and have a look at Newcastle. I know the Committee went there in 2016. I would urge you to go and look at what is happening in Plymouth, Nottingham, Birmingham and Edinburgh. There are really interesting things happening.
The challenge now is to scale those up to more places. When we set out with future parks, we deliberately tried to pick what we call pioneering places—those places that were committed to trying to push things as far as they could as quickly as they could. We always knew, and we had the discussion with MHCLG when it provided £1.2 million of additional funding to the programme, that we really need to reach out to those places that have the worst problems to try to tackle. That is the next part of the problem that we need to tackle.
As Heritage Fund and National Trust, we cannot do that alone. We need Government help—things like that £30 million. If there are ways of using that money more creatively to help with the systemic change, rather than just putting plasters on things, maybe that is a way forward.
Q10 Chair: You mentioned the eight areas. Is there going to be an analysis done as to what has been achieved in practical terms as a result of that?
Drew Bennellick: Absolutely, so there is an evaluation being led by the two universities in Sheffield—an academic piece of research. We have already had a number of reports, which have helped iterate the way the programme is designed. There will be a full evaluation report that shows what has happened.
Q11 Chair: Do you know when?
Drew Bennellick: It will probably be in September or October, once the programme has got to the end. We will publish it on our website.
Q12 Sara Britcliffe: Can I aim my questions towards Councillor Vernon‑Jackson please? In 2016, we heard that 48% of local authorities had adopted a green space strategy. Do we know how many local authorities have now adopted that strategy?
Gerald Vernon-Jackson: The simple answer is no. I do not think that anybody collects that data.
Q13 Sara Britcliffe: How have local authorities been encouraged to work together with health and wellbeing boards?
Gerald Vernon-Jackson: Health and wellbeing boards are increasingly important. They look not only at health areas but, increasingly, at public safety as well. They are becoming a really important place. There is a strong argument for saying that there should be a duty for all health and wellbeing boards to look at public open space, particularly in urban areas, to see what is going on and what could be contributed there.
It needs to be wider than just looking at parks, et cetera. In Portsmouth, we are trying to double the tree cover in the city so that there is greenery across the whole of the city, not just in parks. In areas of terraced housing, where there are not any public open spaces, somebody described to me a tree as a park on top of a stick. We need to think wider than just the areas that are defined as parks. It would be really helpful to have something within the remit of the health and wellbeing boards to say that they should be looking at public open space and how that is used.
Q14 Sara Britcliffe: For local authorities that have adopted a green space strategy, do we think that this is resulting in better quality parks? To follow up from that, is it contributing to our broader agenda, such as climate change, flood mitigations and biodiversity?
Gerald Vernon-Jackson: Where you have a strategy, all these things help to concentrate people’s minds. The issue is that, in lots of councils, we do not have the people to do that work anymore. At the LGA, we have got to the point of creating cultural strategy in a box. We effectively send out almost a ready-made strategy for people to be able to make it work.
The person doing arts and culture might well be running the car parks as well, because there are not the people left in councils anymore to do this work. Help to get these things to happen is really valuable, but the reality is that councils are hollowed out and do not have the capacity to do lots of this work, unless there is real help available to make that happen.
Q15 Bob Blackman: I will ask Gerald first. The position is that planning is a key issue in terms of parks and open spaces. Has there been a change in the prominence of parks and open spaces in local planning decisions?
Gerald Vernon-Jackson: I do not know. We get planning permissions through our council doors the whole time and there are lots of individual ones. Building in a strategy for open spaces within local plans is really important. I know that the Government have been trying to make sure that there is a series of policies that are country-wide to do that.
It is thinking of the imaginative ways of doing it, for instance thinking about tree cover and having that as a specific policy within the local plan, particularly within an urban area. That is something we have not done in the past and it would be really important to do in the future.
Q16 Bob Blackman: Are we seeing that incorporated in local plans?
Gerald Vernon-Jackson: Yes, we are in some places, but local plans take a long time to go through and then get massacred by the planning inspector.
Q17 Bob Blackman: Drew or Peter, do you have any comments on local plans and the implementation of parks and open spaces?
Peter Neal: The role of a parks and green space strategy is incredibly important as the evidence base for the local plan. In addition to Councillor Vernon-Jackson’s response on strategies, a recent figure produced by APSE research in 2021 suggests that 68% of local authorities have parks and green space strategies. However, by 2010 95% of local authorities had them, when CABE—the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment—was charged with supporting local authorities to produce those.
The value of strategies is that they help to focus investment and have been shown to bring in additional support through planning gain, which is an incredibly important part of the planning mechanism, including through the community infrastructure levy. They also provide the ability to co-ordinate activities from a planning team to a service delivery or parks management team, so there is better internal collaboration because you have a script that a strategy provides. Also, they are shown to accelerate the quality of parks, as is indicated by an increase in green flag awards for parks. Planning is very valuable.
I would say, though, that the National Planning Policy Framework could do more, in terms of setting standards for accessibility and ensuring parks are better connected together to provide networks of green space, rather than individual pockets of green space.
Q18 Bob Blackman: That leads me neatly on to the next issue, the Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill, which introduces this concept of a national development management policy. Should there be one for parks and open spaces?
Peter Neal: Yes, there should be.
Q19 Bob Blackman: We should be clear. That would override local decision-making where appropriate.
Peter Neal: There is the urgency on climate change and the importance of resilience of green cities. That is an elevated issue that we are very aware of. The nature recovery agenda, championed by Natural England and Defra, is incredibly important and locked in through nature recovery strategies, with the Environment Bill and the objectives of the 25-year environment plan.
The ability to have a national policy will allow you to connect with those objectives being driven by Defra and Natural England. It would promote the creation of park systems, not just individual parks, that will then work together to provide green travel routes, nature recovery networks and better ecosystem services. The advantages are clear if you have a national policy built in to the development and regeneration agendas.
Drew Bennellick: One thing that has been interesting within the future parks projects is the one across Cambridgeshire, which is the two cities and the district councils. One fear that we had with public parks, particularly as some local authorities were looking at dispersing the management of their public parks to other bodies—so the flagship parks go off to one organisation and the smaller sites might go off to town or parish councils—was that whole falling apart of what is, effectively, a green ecosystem. Interestingly, Cambridgeshire is looking at how public green space works across the whole county, how the links and connections work, particularly thinking about climate and nature recovery.
There are an awful lot of organisations that now have, if you like, skin in the game around public parks and urban green space. Looking at nature recovery and the plan to develop a nature recovery network for the whole of England, the importance of those local nature recovery strategies, and the fact that most people live in our towns and cities—so, if we want more people to engage with nature, it needs to happen where people live, in the towns and cities—there needs to be a much better connection across those places.
Q20 Bob Blackman: To challenge you, on that basis, local people should be making that decision, not a Minister in Whitehall.
Drew Bennellick: No, I would agree, but it needs an overall structure to bring some of that into place. At the moment, things are too random in the way that they happen.
Q21 Bob Blackman: Ellie, I have seen you nodding away in the background there. One issue is that the national planning practice guidance was last updated back in 2014. Do we know if there are any plans to revise the guidance? If so, what would you like to see happen?
Ellie Robinson: I do not know if there are any plans to revise it. I would hope so, because so much has moved on since 2014. The cities and towns we are working with would like to see an update and integration of the national policy framework, as Drew and Peter have said. If you think about what has changed over the last few years, there is definitely a revolution in terms of how we are going to achieve net zero and the climate resilience required within cities through active travel. As Drew said, there is a new requirement in the Environment Bill around nature recovery networks.
Rather than have multiple strategies and plans that are all sitting separately, how can we help local government pull that together in a coherent way? Natural England will talk to you about biodiversity net gain, but there are some really important connections between the strategic improvement of the overall green infrastructure in a city and how you bake that into planning policies and the corporate plans for a city or town.
There is then the ability to attract new funding and finance at an infrastructure level, but also for maintenance. We have been doing quite a lot of work on green finance with our cities. If you are looking at the biodiversity net gain potential for a medium city, it is about £80 million over 30 years for an average city. It is a significant sum of money and that includes some maintenance contributions. There are things coming through the planning system that are going to have a positive impact.
The critical challenge for local government for the next 18 months is having plans in place and helping them set up habitat banks, so they can actually capture the value from developer contributions to biodiversity net gain for their communities. There is a lot to do and the Government could help with the roll-out of that over the next 18 months to two years, so that cities and towns are ready.
In terms of your points, whether that is new powers around national policies, we do not want it to be top down, but it is that framework that allows local places to decide, in a coherent, integrated way, so that they are not wasting time on multiple sister plans, if you like, that do not add up in a coherent way.
Q22 Bob Blackman: Gerald, is there any news about discussions with the LGA about updates to the national planning practice guidance?
Gerald Vernon-Jackson: The one thing that would be hugely useful is that, in planning guidance, public open space is protected. Public open space does not include areas in the public estate that are run by hospitals, the prison service or the defence service, which members of the public access. In planning terms, they are not defined as public open space. When Government choose to sell off these assets, these areas that people have been used to using as public open space get built all over.
If there could be an update to planning regulations that said that green space in publicly owned areas remains public open space and is not developable, that would protect areas that people think of as public open space, but, in planning terms, are not defined in that way and developers can get their hands on. The people who are the worst on this are NHS PropCo. They want to flog off anything that is green in a hospital estate and put houses all over it.
Chair: On that slightly interesting note, we will conclude our first panel session today. Thank you all very much for joining us and giving the information to the Committee. That is really appreciated. We will now go on to our second panel of witnesses.
Witnesses: Helen Griffiths, Alan Law and Dave Morris.
Q23 Chair: Thank you very much to our second panel of witnesses for coming. I will ask you to introduce yourselves in turn.
Dave Morris: I am Dave Morris. I am chair of the National Federation of Parks and Green Spaces, which is the voice of the friends groups movement. There are about 7,000 local independent friends groups across the UK.
Alan Law: I am Alan Law, deputy chief executive at Natural England.
Chair: I think that we have met before.
Alan Law: We have.
Chair: We have certainly met Dave Morris before on the previous inquiry.
Helen Griffiths: I am Helen Griffiths, chief executive of Fields in Trust.
Q24 Chair: Thank you all for coming today. The issue of the pandemic was mentioned in the first panel, which really highlighted the benefit of parks to so many people who found them the only place they could go for leisure, recreation and a simple bit of enjoyment during the lockdown periods. Has that seen an increased demand for the use of parks and open spaces? Has that demand continued post-pandemic? If so, what are the challenges that parks now face?
Dave Morris: The people who are probably most impacted, in terms of management of green spaces, are the people who manage them. Unfortunately they are not represented here today. The usage of green spaces dramatically increased. That brought lots of additional issues, in terms of maintenance and management from cash-strapped councils mainly.
In terms of the community usage by friends groups, so volunteers, we were dramatically affected by the lockdowns. Many groups ceased activities or just went online and were not able to carry out volunteering or the usual maintenance and support that they give to those who manage green spaces. However, I am pleased to say our movement has bounced back. It is fully back up and running, and prepared to roll up our sleeves and support the maintenance and management of parks and green spaces across the UK.
Alan Law: The context is well understood here. During the pandemic, we saw a huge increase in use of green space and feedback from those using green space of how much they valued it during a time of crisis and personal pressure. We also saw great inequalities. We saw inequalities through variation in levels of green infrastructure access, so those available to different parts of our communities.
We saw a compound effect, because those that were perhaps most deprived, in terms of, for example, having access to garden space, coming from lower socioeconomic communities, were also most affected by the pandemic through the lack of wider green infrastructure that they were able to access. There was a compound effect there.
What we also saw that had a compounding effect, in those areas where there were poorly managed green spaces, were increases in antisocial behaviour, which, of itself, made access to those green spaces less appealing. The learning from that is around having good-quality green spaces available for our communities to access, but also the importance of having that quality green space managed so that it is safe and accessible to people.
There are a few bits of evidence. We learned that most people were accessing green spaces that were quite close to them. Two-thirds of visits were happening on foot, within two miles of the home, so people were valuing green space close to them. Further afield than that, they were going to drive.
You asked a question about whether this has been sustained. Some 62% of the adult population had visited a green space within the last two weeks in 2021. If we look at the same period in 2022, 61% had visited a green space within the last 14 days between January and March. Our understanding is that it is being sustained.
As a little bit of evidence around the inequalities, 26% of adults surveyed had not spent any time in green spaces. That is from society as a whole. If you then take that down to those earning under £15,000 a year, that figure rises to 37%. You can see the skews in societal patterns.
Chair: We move on now to Helen Griffiths. I declared at the beginning that I am a trustee of Fields in Trust. I put that on the record.
Helen Griffiths: To add to the comments that Dave and Alan have already made, we saw a reliance on parks and green spaces during the pandemic as a crucial part of local service delivery and one that was put under increasing pressure by the increase in use that we saw across the piece. During that time, we saw people relying on parks and green spaces as a bit of a lifeline.
As Alan has said, that experience was extremely different for different people. Where there is poorer provision and less access to green space, that was felt much more keenly, particularly for the one in eight households that do not have access to private outdoor space. For those people for whom the park is their back garden, we must make sure that those spaces are close to home and of a good quality. It is increasingly important that we do not continue to widen that gap that we know already exists from an equity perspective.
Our research completely concurs with the stats that Alan has already given. We know that 57% of people say that parks are important when they are considering where to live—more important than schools, libraries and pubs, which is probably slightly surprising on some levels. They are seeing that as a crucial part of decision-making, in terms of the placemaking piece and what is important to where people want to live, raise their families and have those positive experiences.
The fact that people are using those spaces that are closer to home came out very strongly during the pandemic. It concurs with the data from Natural England, in that 52% of people were using the spaces most close to home, rather than those destination parks. They were more aware of the hyperlocal. The spaces that were on people’s doorsteps that might not have had all the facilities of some of the larger destination parks became very important. It is those spaces in between, in communities, particularly in more deprived communities, that we need to be really mindful of when we are thinking about how we look at the provision and protection of those spaces.
I would completely agree with all the points that have been made around the fact that we saw the relevance of those parks and green spaces for health and wellbeing in an entirely different way, and one that the past couple of weeks has also shone a different light on. We are seeing public health crises through the pandemic and heatwave, and parks and green spaces as a solution to that for local people.
Q25 Kate Hollern: I recognise the need for parks. They offer wonderful opportunities, but it is important for local engagement as well. Can you tell me some of the work the Parks Action Group achieved? What were the successes for the Parks Action Group?
Helen Griffiths: Do you mean in terms of local engagement or across the piece?
Kate Hollern: I mean across the piece, but particularly local engagement.
Helen Griffiths: We heard in the first panel some of the feedback around the Parks Action Group, some of the things that were not particularly successful and the frustrations that many members of the Parks Action Group, us included, had, in terms of getting the kind of buy-in that we needed from the Department and from other Departments. That is where the biggest gap was, in terms of having that cross-departmental representation to match the cross-sectoral group that was set up and that put a huge amount of time and effort into developing the six work strands that came out of the Parks Action Group.
We had six core work strands looking at vision and values, standards, community empowerment and engagement, and knowledge and skills. We were trying to build the business case, as we have heard from all the contributors this morning, around how we position parks and green spaces differently to be able to create a different output that brings together the funding and opportunities that we know they can present.
We heard from the previous panellists of some of the outcomes from the group, in terms of reports into skills, led by APSE, and looking at the business case, led by the Parks Alliance. Those did not see the light of day until it was too late. There were massive issues in getting the publication of work through the system and being able to get the visibility that would have been useful at an earlier stage from those particular work strands.
Dave is probably best placed to comment on the community empowerment piece, which was one of the more successful work strands. I know that we will probably pick up on the green infrastructure standards piece as part of the other questions that are coming.
Q26 Kate Hollern: I am really interested in the co‑ordination, rather than just one group being responsible, but the co-ordination and support for groups to make them successful.
Dave Morris: You mean in terms of community groups.
Kate Hollern: Yes.
Dave Morris: I chaired the empowering communities workstream of the PAG. For the short time that it operated and the limited money that was available, it was quite successful. We held regional mini conferences in every part of England to gauge opinion and help with co-ordination.
I will say a bit about the friends groups movement generally, because a key recommendation that the Government accepted from your report was to strengthen the friends groups movement and the co-ordination of that movement, which we basically exist to provide. There are about 7,000 independent local friends groups and about 70 friends forums in different towns and cities across the UK. There is great potential for increasing the number of groups and the amount of co-ordination.
That represents about 60,000 core volunteers, activists, and about 840,000 members of friends groups across the UK. It is a very significant movement. It achieves about 7 million hours’ volunteering a year, which is significant. The lottery calculated in 2016 that this movement provided about £120 million annually in terms of volunteering and accessing funding streams that councils cannot access. That would have only gone up since then, because the movement is continuing to grow. All in all, it is a very significant movement.
It is also publicising and promoting parks and organising activities. There is a huge range of things that friends groups are doing. A lot of it goes under the radar, but it is about local communities taking responsibility for their local green spaces and working with the very stretched current management that the authorities can provide.
Q27 Kate Hollern: The PAG has not met for two years. Different reports said that there was slow progress and they were not quite confident in the achievements. From what you are saying, it sounds as though that is a title but other groups are actioning this.
Dave Morris: It was very short term. The issue with the Parks Action Group is that, if you read the 25-year environmental plan from the Government, there is a commitment to work with the Parks Action Group, and that is through the life of the plan. These kinds of changes that we want to see and strategies that we want to implement are for the long term. Green spaces are like oil tankers: they take a long time to turn round. This is not a five-minute job. We want ongoing commitment, funding and collaboration with Government to achieve the outcomes that we all want to see.
Q28 Kate Hollern: You would like to see the PAG revitalised, but better supported and co-ordinated.
Dave Morris: Whatever it is called, whether it is revitalised or changed, there is a need for collaboration within the sector, but also linked in with Government, and a serious commitment by Government to support what is essential infrastructure. It is important that we have all said that parks are essential infrastructure. They need to be properly funded, just like our roads, transport or gas and electric supplies—whatever it is. They cannot be expected to be organising jumble sales to try to keep their local parks up and running. This is essential infrastructure.
Government should bite the bullet and say, “This should be a statutory service, properly funded through taxation.” This is a rich country. The Sunday Times Rich List only last month said that there are now 177 billionaires in this country, with a total personal income of £710 billion. That is going up every year, which is shocking, considering that public services are being cut every year. It is not acceptable.
Q29 Kate Hollern: Alan, from what you have experienced, is there enough cross-departmental working in Government in support of parks and open spaces?
Alan Law: I will pick up on the Parks Action Group and then lead into that question, if I may. We have seen the Parks Action Group being less active during the period of Covid and subsequently. As people have said, lots of good work is continuing to go on on the ground, but we need some clear and strong leadership here. We would like to see a revitalised Parks Action Group. We would like to see stronger cross-departmental leadership from a lead Department. DLUHC would look to be the logical place for that.
We note uncertainty as to whether there is actually a formally constituted Parks Minister now. There used to be, but it is not evident if there is these days. Similarly, there is a lack of a cross-Government parks strategy. Parks have the potential to fall between stools. On the one hand, there is nature work. On the other hand, there is urban work. There is DLUHC work and Defra work. It is very easy for parks to fall between those and thereby not actually be picked up, supported, funded and championed by anyone.
From the Covid period, we have seen a need for not just those two Departments but the Department of Health and Social Care, the Department for Education and the Department for Transport—all those that have interest in this area—to be brought together. Clear statutory targets are needed around parks and access to green space. At the moment, in the 25-year environment plan, you have good targets for biodiversity. You have things for landscape, water quality and air quality. You do not have anything for access. The lack of those targets creates the space for inactivity, if you like.
In relation to work that is being done under the levelling-up Bill, there is space here for green infrastructure to be one of the national design codes linked into that target.
There is a need to establish a cross-departmental, or cross-policy area, funding mechanism, such that local authorities can look at green spaces and parks as assets that they invest in, which provide a financial return and a return in terms of services to people in local communities, rather than what is potentially currently the view, which is that these are liabilities because they cost money to maintain. The evidence shows that the return from investment in this green space pays for itself many times over. We need to create a funding mechanism across policy areas that supports local government in making those decisions.
The last thing in this space that we would like to see is some kind of formal reporting mechanism, again linked back to statutory targets, whereby we report back on the state of our parks, the state of accessible green space to our communities, so there is some profile around those targets and we can see and measure whether progress is being made.
Helen Griffiths: To add to the points that Alan was making, there is a real need for clarity on who is leading on the issues of urban parks and green spaces. Through the pandemic, we saw a further clouding of that position because of exactly what was just described, in terms of where things sat between Defra and DLUHC. The Parks Action Group has not met for quite some time because of the lack of a sitting Minister and the ability for us to take that forward.
During the pandemic, the urban stakeholders network was set up to try to pick up that mantle and create that engagement across the sector. That was very much needed at a time that it was under a completely new and extraordinary pressure. That was being led through Natural England, but is now looking for a new home.
We need to find a new place to create that opportunity to convene the players involved in that conversation, but also a broader set of constituents that represent all the various interests that we have been talking about. That will give Government the natural umbrella body to go to and have conversations about what is needed in the sector, in a way that avoids some of the fragmentation we have seen over the past couple of years.
Q30 Chair: Alan Law, picking up your data question, we suffer from data frustration on this Committee as well on a whole range of issues. Would it be helpful if there was a yearly provision of data on how much is spent on parks, rather than having to dig away at the various spending in local government and the subsections it comes under?
Alan Law: That would be helpful. Also, work that is being done under the green infrastructure framework, which we will come on to, will provide a format against which local authorities can produce local strategies. They can then report on not just what they are spending but what the outcome of that spend has been in terms of improvements in quality, extent or use.
Dave Morris: There was a report produced by the Parks Action Group on the funding for parks through local authorities across the country. This report was sat on by the Department and never published, but it has been published since by some of the members of the Parks Action Group.
Q31 Chair: Can we have a copy of that?
Dave Morris: You can have this copy. It shows that funding for park services through local authorities dramatically declined since 2010 by 30% or 40%.
Q32 Chair: It is the yearly update that we want to try to get to as well. Moving on to accessibility issues and Helen Griffiths, you already referred to these quite wide differences in the ability of people to access parks depending on where they live, what their income levels are and what their ethnic group is. Has any progress been made in the last few years since we did our Committee report?
Helen Griffiths: I would like to say yes, but, sadly, the answer is no. We see that there are still significant disparities in provision, which are impacting those disadvantaged communities harder than others, as we have heard. We know that 2.8 million people live further than a 10‑minute walk from a local park or green space. That 10‑minute walk proxy is incredibly important, in terms of making sure people have access to nature on their doorstep. We need to address that.
When we look at the disparities in provision in some of the poorest communities, we can see a very clear opportunity to link to the levelling-up agenda and use that as the hook to drive forward an improvement in performance. From this year’s Fields in Trust green space index, we can see that 40% of the poorest performing areas, in terms of the overall provision of green space to meet the needs of the local population, fall into levelling-up category 1.
We know that there is a clear correlation between those issues and that we should be looking at green space as one of the vehicles and the assets, rather than the liabilities, to Alan’s point, to drive forward the reimagining of those spaces. There is an opportunity through the pride in place and that creation of more prosperous communities to use green spaces to sit in the middle of that piece.
Q33 Chair: It is an opportunity, but how do we deliver the opportunity? How do we make it happen?
Helen Griffiths: I will bring in another couple of data points. We know that, looking forward, this issue is set to only get worse. If we project forward to 2040, based on population growth alone, assuming that we do not lose any of the green space that we currently have and that it is not developed in the way that has been referred to by Councillor Vernon-Jackson and others this morning, two-thirds of local authority areas will fail to meet the minimum standard of green space provision. It is incredibly stark to think that, in that amount of time, we are going to have such a poor performance against minimum standards of provision.
We know already that one in three people does not have access to nature‑rich spaces near to home in our most deprived neighbourhoods. In terms of moving into the solutions to those things, we have to recognise green space as a core part of the levelling-up agenda and prioritise the distribution of that green space in areas that are going to benefit the most.
That means we need to use the data that we have, that Natural England has, that Ordnance Survey has, to see what that provision piece looks like and ensure that, when we think about placemaking, we are not thinking about parks and green spaces through the lens of the park department, as has already been said. We are looking at the multiple benefits—pride in place, climate resilience, and health and wellbeing outcomes—that can be generated from them.
Q34 Chair: Moving on to that wider issue, there are also inequalities in terms of the health inequalities that we see in communities. Natural England has been involved in a project with Defra on social prescribing. What have we learned, and is that going to lead to improved access to green spaces in poorer communities?
Alan Law: From that project, we are learning that there are multiple barriers to accessing green space and they are locally specific. They are not standard, generic, national ones. We know that we can put green infrastructure in in places on the ground, but connecting people to that green infrastructure takes services. The work on social prescription thus far has brought only 1,000 people into green prescription activities, but it is working towards a target of bringing 900,000 in by 2023-24.
We need funding stability in place to put in place the social prescription services. We also have learned that the scheme itself is currently running ahead of some of the data and information management services that we have. We need some of our information tools to catch up, so we can use the evidence to target most efficiently where and how those services are provided.
Q35 Chair: It is just that 1,000 to 900,000 seems an awfully big leap in a year.
Alan Law: It is in a pilot phase at the moment, but that is the target.
Q36 Chair: Is it going to be hit? What is your assessment? Is that target going to be hit?
Alan Law: I will have to come back to you on that one.
Q37 Chair: Is there anything more that needs to be done to achieve it?
Alan Law: There is more investment needed. The push and impetus that could be provided alongside it in relation to the green space targets that I described earlier on is also needed. At the moment, we have work to provide services in order to enable people to access green space under social prescription, and we have work to manage green space. They are not currently joined up by any statutory requirement, so they are operating in parallel. The targets would support that join-up. Does that make sense?
Dave Morris: Can I come in there as an example? I am chair of the friends group for my local park in Tottenham. It is Tottenham’s district park. We had £4 million lottery investment and the council had to match £2.5 million to go with that. As a result, the usage of the park has tripled. One thing that we did to ensure that was to build a community centre with a seven-days-a-week café and public toilets. If we want people to access parks, they have to be properly resourced and have the facilities that people need. That is what attracts people mostly into the parks.
The message is that the lottery has put in £1 billion over the last 25 years. That has covered about 900 parks out of 27,000, which have benefited from lottery investment. We need Government investment on a similar scale, but for all 27,000 UK parks.
Q38 Chair: Or getting hold of one or two of these billionaires that you were talking about.
Dave Morris: To be honest, taxing them 5% of that £710 billion would finance the entire park services of the country for about 10 years.
Q39 Chair: That is probably a little bit beyond the terms of reference of this inquiry. There is one final point from me. There is a UN sustainable development goal to provide universal access to safe, inclusive and accessible green and public spaces by 2030. That is a bit optimistic, is it not? Dave, do you have a brief comment?
Dave Morris: I will pass on that one.
Alan Law: Is it optimistic? I am afraid that it probably is, yes. I am still conscious of your last question and I am going to come back with some stats around trajectories for you, if I may send them into the Committee afterwards.
Chair: That would be very helpful.
Helen Griffiths: Yes, that sounds optimistic. If we are to be able to achieve anything along those lines, we have to get into the conversation around what standards we expect to be met and how we make them compulsory. How do we make sure that we are future proofing long-term access to green space?
Q40 Chair: What is the standard that we would need to set to get to that goal?
Helen Griffiths: We should have a park or green space within a 10-minute walk of where everybody lives.
Dave Morris: The standard of the green space should be green flag award standard. That is a Government-run scheme, managed by Keep Britain Tidy. It is a standard that every single green space should reach. To your idea of annual audits, it would be helpful to audit every green space every year across the country to green flag award standard. Then we can see the improvement, or lack of it, that would be being made.
Q41 Bob Blackman: Alan, we are hearing that new standards will be published soon, as part of, as you mentioned, the green infrastructure framework. What do you expect us to see in those standards?
Alan Law: What is coming out at the moment, or what has been published already, is the principles—so the why, the what and the way in which good green infrastructure should be delivered. We have also produced a beta version of the green infrastructure mapping tool, which is there for local authorities and developers to look at their existing green space and areas that are opportunities for new green space provision. We have also provided an evidence review around health and wellbeing.
What is going to be coming out over the next 12 months includes some of our headline green infrastructure standards. Those standards will include accessible natural green space provision, which relates to the comments earlier about it being 10 to 15 minutes’ walk to the nearest green space and what the scale and quality standards are associated to those. Green flag criteria will be one of those standards. There will be another standard around urban tree canopy cover standards and national urban greening factors.
There is a series of these that will be coming out as tools to support local authorities in their decision-making. The thing I would emphasise at the moment is that these are discretionary. These are enabling tools that we are providing. Alongside these, in recognition of the value of these bits of infrastructure and services that are being provided, there needs to be a bit more teeth and more drive to set targets for local authorities to adopt and implement these standards, and then monitor and report against their provision.
Q42 Bob Blackman: Helen, what else would you like to see come out of the green infrastructure framework?
Helen Griffiths: We would like to see some progress on exactly the last point that Alan made there. The framework that has been set out, in terms of the minimum and aspirational standards around green infrastructure in new and existing areas, is a really positive move forward. As part of the advisory group, we recognise what a challenging landscape it is to bring a lot of stakeholders into that conversation.
As they are not mandatory, our concern is, as a set of advisory standards, how much implementation there is going to be. What kind of leadership is going to be shown, in terms of pushing for local authorities to use these discretionary tools that will become available and to have the capacity in place to take the actions that are suggested and, importantly, monitor the picture going forward? From our perspective, we would very much like to see, and have advocated from the beginning of this process, the standards including a future‑proofing metric.
I know that there has been a lot of conversation around how we include no net loss in particular areas, because there are local authorities that cannot necessarily deliver net gain. We want to see how we can identify a percentage of the green infrastructure provided that is future proofed outside of the current planning position, so that we know that future generations will have access to that space.
That is the core work of Fields in Trust, to make sure that we are independently protecting parks and green spaces. We are currently doing it with Liverpool City Council, which is protecting every single park in the city—all the 100 spaces. We know that those spaces are going to be there for future generations to use. The green infrastructure standards represent a fantastic opportunity to put that metric in place. We will be in a position only to encourage local authorities to take that approach, but that, alongside other protection mechanisms, can help to make sure that we are not going to be in that position that I just described, where, in 2040, two-thirds of local authorities are failing to meet the minimum standard.
Q43 Bob Blackman: We heard earlier that one of the areas that is most under threat is publicly owned land through the National Health Service or other bodies. Would you like to see any changes in terms of restricting what can be done on those particular sites?
Helen Griffiths: When we look at green infrastructure across the piece, it is complicated, is it not? We have those very issues around what is available for public access and what is contributing to access to nature in its widest terms. We need to review those losses to green infrastructure that is used in custom and practice by the public, even if it is not necessarily in that ownership, and consider how that is going to impact on the picture.
Q44 Bob Blackman: The Government have set out a 25-year plan in terms of parks and open spaces. Is it adequate? What else would you like to see included within it?
Dave Morris: It does not say a lot about Government commitment to green spaces. There is a lot of talk about engaging youth and working with the Parks Action Group, which has not happened in the last three years. It needs to be much stronger.
In fact, some of us in the Parks Action Group, and others, launched a charter for parks, setting out a range of issues we felt were crucial. Most important was that there be a legal duty to manage public green space to a green flag award standard across the whole country. That needs to be backed up by proper funding to local authorities and other parks management. That is the kind of commitment that we want to see from Government.
As I say, the charter is backed by 24 national organisations. There was a petition to the inquiry that you held; 322,000 people signed a petition calling for that. Since then, the Mail on Sunday launched a “save our parks” campaign, backed by, I think, 20,000 supporters, which used some of the parks charter, including a legal duty to manage green space to a green flag award standard.
It is a non-party political issue. Everybody loves green spaces, but they are, as I have said, essential infrastructure. Therefore, they have to be properly financed. A lot of the problems and agonising over strategies and projects comes about because, fundamentally, there is a lack of adequate funding. If the funding was there, a lot of the problems and challenges would melt away.
Q45 Bob Blackman: I am hearing rumours from certain local authorities that they might even start charging for access to parks and open spaces. I can imagine your reaction to it, but I ask it anyway.
Dave Morris: We will be storming the gates of the local park.
Bob Blackman: I assume you would not be in agreement.
Helen Griffiths: No, absolutely not. We would remain completely in support of free at the point of access. One interesting thing that came out of the pandemic was that there were a couple of occasions where, due to health and safety issues, local authorities were under an enormous amount of pressure and had to close some local parks for short amounts of time for the safety of the community. The reaction that that created in those communities—the thought of having that lack of access to that open space—is a really good indication of what it would look like if we lost those spaces.
Alan Law: Could I come back to your question about public land? What was described around safeguarding public land for potential access is entirely rational and sensible. Provisionally, that is where you would go. I would be keen, though, that we look strategically at plans for places around where the need is. If you focus solely on publicly owned land in the first instance, there is a risk that you end up being driven where land is available, rather than where it is actually needed. You also take the focus off the private sector and the contribution that that has to make in that mix.
My urge would be that we invest properly in local nature recovery strategies that include all aspects of nature, including green infrastructure and access, and make plans for where that is most needed. That may mean that we have over-provision in some areas or there are changes that can be made to existing features, and in other areas we need to take some quite difficult choices to provide the infrastructure that is needed. A more strategic approach, rather than a reactive one based on simply public land, would be my vote.
Chair: Thank you all very much for coming to give evidence to us today. That has been very interesting. I will probably get representations from a few billionaires to say that they regret being under threat from our discussions. Apart from that, I think that everybody else will be very interested and supportive of the comments that have been made today and the importance of public parks. I do not think that we can overemphasise that. I am sure that is something that has general support within our communities, so thank you very much indeed.
Before I close our session, I thought I would put on record, as Chair of the Committee—I am sure members would agree with me—thanks to all our Committee staff for the work they have done for us and the contributions they have made to our deliberations in the past few weeks. We have had an awful lot of work and an awful lot of different inquiries on a wide range of issues that we have discussed. Thank you very much indeed. Please pass on our thanks, JP, to the members of your staff who are not here today as well.