16
Horticultural Sector Committee
Corrected oral evidence: The horticultural sector
Thursday 15 June 2023
11.30 am
Watch the meeting
Members present: Lord Redesdale (The Chair); The Earl of Arran; Lord Colgrain; Lord Curry of Kirkharle; Baroness Fookes; Baroness Jones of Whitchurch; Lord Sahota; Baroness Walmsley; Lord Watson of Wyre Forest.
Evidence Session No. 16 Heard in Public Questions 191 - 201
Witnesses
I: Wayne Grills, Chief Executive, British Association of Landscape Industries (BALI); Judy Ling Wong CBE, Honorary President, Black Environment Network; Patricia Wallace, Northern Ireland Manager, Social Farms and Gardens.
Wayne Grills, Judy Ling Wong and Patricia Wallace.
Q191 The Chair: Thank you for coming. I will ask the first question. What I would like you to do is say who you are and give a bit of background about your organisation, as well as answering the question. What is the role and value of green urban space?
Judy Ling Wong: I am the honorary president of the Black Environment Network. I am also a poet and painter.
Green urban space makes a lot of difference because it is the basis on which our organisation has been very creative and innovative in its approach to involving ethnic minorities as part of the environmental movement. We make a lot of horticulture because gardens, plants and food plants are where ordinary people make the most connections with the living world. Therefore, they all link into green spaces, which again would be called cultivars and other things in our parks and green spaces, through the living process to wildness. We always say that this connection of 30 years of participation can be collapsed into two phrases: “We love what we enjoy”, and, “We protect what we love”. The proximity of green spaces and exposure to nature lays down the basis for all future contributions.
The Chair: Patricia, before you make your submission, Lord Curry has an interest to declare.
Lord Curry of Kirkharle: Yes, I need to inform the committee that I have an interest. I am president of Social Farms and Gardens.
Patricia Wallace: Good morning, Lord Curry.
Lord Curry of Kirkharle: Good morning.
Patricia Wallace: I am on the executive team of Social Farms and Gardens, and I am also the Northern Ireland manager. I have come over from Belfast this morning. We are a membership organisation and a charity. Our members are community gardeners, allotments—you have just heard from the allotment society—community orchards, guerrilla gardeners, and alleyway gardeners. Especially during lockdown, we saw a rise in unused and unloved spaces being turned into little paradises on people’s doorsteps.
I would reflect what Judy just said: these spaces have to be close to where people live. They have to be behind their houses, at the end of the street, within walking distance—a 20-minute community. When you think about urban horticulture, you must think close to where people live, especially in areas of deprivation, where people may not have gardens and cars. You are thinking close, and about connecting people with the magic of growing: with seeing a seed become a plant, becoming something that you can eat and then becoming a seed again. Seeing that life cycle is so important for us all.
We hear all the time about the disconnect between city dwellers and citizens in towns and villages and their food producers. Urban agriculture appearing in little pockets, in little spaces that have been unused before, starts that reconnection. At Social Farms and Gardens, we certainly think that the array of community growing has a big part to play in us starting to heal as people, as communities and as a planet into the future.
The Chair: Wayne, one of the issues for the committee is that we are split between horticulture, the things people eat, and the ornamental sector—
Baroness Fookes: And environmental.
The Chair: —environmental and ornamental sector, so please start on that basis.
Wayne Grills: Thanks for inviting me. I am the chief executive of the British Association of Landscape Industries, a 50 year-old trade association for landscape contractors, garden designers and suppliers, and training providers to the industry. We have in the region of 950 accredited members, with a combined annual turnover of about £11.2 billion. Our members employ around 130,000 staff as well. That gives you a feel for the size of our contribution.
I am also a member of the Environmental Horticultural Group, which was relaunched in the Houses of Parliament last week. I chair the more recently set up sub-committee of that group for planning, infrastructure and water abstraction. That is my role.
We look at the role of green urban spaces slightly differently but still on a very even keel. I am sure that the committee is aware of the value of green spaces, but in the wider sector, particularly among local authorities, being city-based maintains a sustainable environment, enhances human well-being, and provides a platform for social connection and interaction with each other and with nature. From that perspective, we certainly found a reconnection back with nature during the Covid pandemic.
Green spaces absorb CO2, decrease temperatures, reduce urban heat, improve air quality and humidity, conserve water and minimise noise pollution. Urban green spaces can include a range of ecosystems as well, which can benefit in many different ways. As we have heard, research has proven that close proximity to urban green spaces is of great socioeconomic benefit, and of benefit to vulnerable groups. Appropriate management of green spaces—you may hear this as a bit of a theme from me today—is crucial and maximises the provision of those ecosystem services. Studies undertaken by Sheffield and Exeter universities, to name a couple, demonstrate that human connection with nature and urban green spaces is hugely beneficial.
Q192 Baroness Fookes: We have already touched on the point I particularly want to raise, which is: how do nature-based activities, in one way or the other, help to support thriving communities, particularly individuals?
Judy Ling Wong: I would first look at the intent and the purpose of providing nature-based activities. One is for well-being for communities and so on: they affect mood and individuals’ well-being, which is fundamental to everything that we do. Beyond that, nature-based activities provide opportunities of various kinds. I would point out the enormous opportunity in the Government’s effort to create 2 million new green jobs in this country, including in horticulture, across energy and so on. These 2 million green jobs will enable ordinary people to choose to devote their entire working lives to the creation of a sustainable green future for everyone.
Where do people start to make those links of aspiration? Nature-based activities are part of it, when people realise that what happens in nature is about not just nature but nature and people, and that having an environment that supports life is the basis of everything. This purposeful approach to nature-based activities is extremely important, as it builds within it informal education of all kinds as a stepping stone into participation at different levels within society, such as having a green job, or being an advocate and a champion, a source of information on parks and so on. Using that education makes ideas become real and shows what happens when you take personal action within your own life, and when you campaign and make links between people, the planet, the environment, your immediate neighbourhood and your own life. That is what it means when nature-based activities are designed purposefully.
Parks and green spaces are one of the ways in which we can do this, because they are local and a continuous presence. If we design activities in green spaces, community gardens and so on, we can affect people’s lives in continuity, with a drip feed of information, to build this big picture so that people have real choices to make about their very future.
Patricia Wallace: Nature is our economy. All our resources come from nature. Nature is not an infinite resource. We have to replenish, to nurture and to appreciate our resources. We are in deficit. We have lost a lot of our nature and a lot of habitat for our companion species. We have to put it back. We have to start practising agroecology and regenerative food growing, with no chemicals, pesticides or plastic. We need to enhance and put back.
I am sure people have experienced the sad loss of things in cities. In Belfast, we used to get murmurations of starlings over bridges. You do not see that anymore. You used to get a lot of bugs and flies on your windscreen. You do not see that anymore. We are losing species and the appreciation of nature all the time.
Regreening and having a green infrastructure plan that includes all the elements of urban horticulture—whether the more formal council-led allotment or informal spontaneous guerrilla gardening on a local space that is really wasteland—connects people with nature and the cycle of nature. You get an appreciation of your hard-grown food without the same waste at the end of the cycle because of the appreciation.
We have to be careful that stewardship of these places is by local people; that is what we are interested in. We practise asset-based community development, which says that people have the skills if they have the opportunity and the land for these projects. A key thing is the release of public land by public landowners to the community, to be managed by the community to let them imagine what can be on that space.
Wayne Grills: As we have mentioned, studies show that there is a direct correlation between green spaces and reducing stress, anxiety and depression, for example, through interaction with nature-based activities. They also help multigenerational families to connect, relate and socialise in a stress-free environment. For example, older generations, such as mine, have childhood experiences of years gone by, versus the younger generation’s lack of outdoor knowledge and experiences that perhaps we see a lot more of today. Nature-based activities also have a significant role in supporting communities and citizen well-being.
Q193 Lord Colgrain: My question is to Judy to begin with, please. How accessible and inclusive are urban green spaces to people from all backgrounds? How could any perceived green gap be closed?
Judy Ling Wong: The picture is uneven. We have terrific examples of welcome and involvement, and we also have neglect. We have an absence of green spaces, so people cannot have that relationship in the first place. There are various gaps that we need to plug. The first is the presence of green spaces. The second is to see green spaces strategically as focal points for involvement with the purpose of integration, so that people feel a sense of belonging, of safety, and of excitement from being with everybody. This is what a local green space can give when it is successful. When you are part of everything you do everything: you contribute, you give and you take.
However, plugging the gaps is very important, and it can be more strategic. For example, the National Federation of Parks and Green Spaces says it has 7,000 friends groups, and it is about to launch a project to reach out to local ethnic minorities to become more inclusive. It sees good examples within its network that it will promote, but it also needs to train people to be more confident and to have the skills to reach into local communities so that they use the spaces happily and safely, and become part of the picture.
That tremendous holding of society is so symbolic in green spaces, because they are free and open spaces. It has a very different feel from being accepted at work or at school: this is a free, open space that you come into. When you are confident and you belong to it, you linger. That is one of the greatest points. When you linger you are visible as part of the community. You meet each other and you do activities together.
For example, we can strategically resource friends groups to have more skills, especially horticultural skills, so that they can introduce things where people can help to maintain our spaces. We have a terrific lack of resources in green spaces, so let us increase the volunteer force and enable people to advance on that journey with a combination of enjoyment and learning.
In urban green spaces, one of the things people respond to most is simply beauty. The beauty of flowerbeds is a tremendous joy in the city. People need to be part of that or, to be even more imaginative, we need them to recognise how beautiful vegetables are by having decorative beds made out of vegetables to demonstrate the processes of growing and so on. When people are truly interested, it can advance into careers in horticulture and they can become leaders in their communities to advance this knowledge as well.
One of the things we need to do to plug the gaps is to realise that, where there are no green spaces, we can, for example, put pot gardens on council estates—little gardens on balconies. People’s indoor pot plants can be the continuity in their lives, but they have to get them from somewhere. While it is perhaps not completely local, outreach from the nearest green spaces can help us to enable and increase this knowledge and access to make it part of people’s lives.
Patricia Wallace: We all need to work continually on our equality, diversity and inclusion. For an organisation like mine, which is an umbrella body, it is our duty to help our members to be inclusive and to help them be proactive in attracting new communities into their gardens or their garden space.
Scotland has an indicator for access to green space that the committee might like to look at for policy on access to green space. It is something that needs to keep being monitored and evaluated. When we create new green space, and if we think of it for urban horticulture, we have to look at communities where there are fewer gardens and people do not have access to the same amount of green space: there may not be a 20-minute park somewhere close by, so you have to be deliberate about where you put new growing sites.
You need a systems approach: a community-led, grass-roots outreach programme. Social Farms and Gardens has a UK-wide network of all these growing sites, so it is very well placed. For a relatively modest investment, there would be a lot of return from deliberately trying to ensure that spaces are inclusive to all.
Lord Colgrain: You say that Scotland has an indicator, but who compiles the information and statistics?
Patricia Wallace: The Government have an indicator for access to green and blue space. I can give you the link.
Lord Colgrain: That would be very helpful. Thank you.
Wayne Grills: We know that green spaces and landscapes do not differentiate between species of wildlife or human species. However, planning rules and decision-making of green spaces can. We know about the correlation between green-space deprivation and ethnicity and income from a recent study. Only 57% of adults lived within five minutes’ walk of green space. That figure fell to 39% for people from black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds and was only 46% for those with a household income of under £15,000, compared with 63% for those with incomes of over £35,000 and 70% for those with more than £70,000. We can see the direct correlation: having green spaces within walking distance positively influences the longevity of residents’ lives, regardless of age, sex or socioeconomic status. Ensuring that green spaces are accessible would be the second part of the question but will play an important part.
My association has been working, with a couple of our board members, on an EDI policy, both internally and across our environmental horticultural industry. Many organisations have signed up to an EDI charter to help promote better planning, design and process across a wide range of projects to make sure that clients understand the importance, from a commercial and residential point of view, of designing those spaces for people.
Q194 Baroness Walmsley: I have a question for Patricia that follows nicely from Judy’s mention of skills in answer to the last question. How easy is it, particularly for amateurs, to identify, understand and grow plants in urban environments that are suitable for the local area and offer maximum environmental, as well as social, benefit?
Patricia Wallace: Local skills and knowledge do exist in our membership. It always surprises me how skilled people are in their growing, right through to making their own compost. I heard the discussion about commercial compost, but we have master composters in Ireland and across the UK who produce their own within their own sites. That is where we want to get to and get others to. You will find that local experts are there. We have run many peer-to-peer education programmes to share those skills across community projects.
The returns on intensively managed small urban spaces are at least comparable with the return on agriculture, but generally they will have a much smaller carbon and water footprint. If we allow some plants to go through their full cycle, to flower and to seed, we can select the seed that is best fitted to that local area. Then you start to get seed banks of local seeds. Supporting those local seed initiatives is important so that they can do their crucial work and boost the local resilience that we need and will need more.
The low-cost, high-return element of urban resilience is in seed saving, because then you do not even need to purchase your seeds. You have a great London Freedom Seed Bank here, and the Incredible Seed Library in Wales. Northern Ireland has the Food Security Through Seed Saving & Exchange’s Seed It Union. These have excited growers and allow them to grow exactly what is suitable for their local area.
Baroness Walmsley: Can I probe that a little? How difficult is it to measure the high output and low inputs that you are talking about? The sector is very disparate. How can it be done?
Patricia Wallace: If you look at some of the permaculture examples, you will see that everything is going on on a small plot. You are growing herbs, seed saving, and growing fruit bushes and nut bushes: you have everything within a small area. There is more opportunity for more heat and shelter in a city than the open field, so you tend to get higher productivity per square metre. Also, people tend to it very differently: their vegetables are like gold and there is less waste. Studies have been done. I know that you had George Monbiot here; I am sure he gave you the figures. It is much more intense in a regenerative way.
Judy Ling Wong: I will talk about the context within which we look at skills. Britain is a wild landscape; we must recognise that. Technically, it is known as an impoverished landscape, because we have very few native plants. Historically, plants moved from Europe into what is the now-separated Britain. When the land bridge broke, the movement of plants was disrupted, so we have very few plants that are native to these islands. In fact, our landscape, both natural and horticultural, is multicultural, with plants from Europe and from all over the world.
Embodied within that are the skills to take care of these plants, because the movement of plants paralleled the movement of people. The people who have come here carry with them skills for a wide spectrum of the plants that we see every day. I did a project in a school garden on the identity confirmation of schoolchildren. The idea was to plant plants from every country of those schoolchildren’s heritage. After I promised that, I went to my expert horticultural friend and said, “Linda, what am I going to do? Where are we going to find these plants?” She laughed and said, “If only the English knew: the English cottage garden is nothing but a glorified collection of foreign weeds”. She said that we are frightened of not finding plants that grow here, when everything from every part of the world that will grow here has already been found in the English garden. She said, “Go and find all the plants and when you have finished you will have an English garden”.
The remarkable thing was that when, we achieved that, the children who had been walking to school and seeing all the English front gardens in the streets suddenly realised that they were all multicultural gardens and that they have been here for a very long time as people. Thus, the circumstances in which we do things is very important.
Multicultural communities bring skills. When we were walking around part of the green belt with a keeper in Edinburgh, there was a very miserable plant that was not doing very well. One of the visitors that we brought said, “I recognise that plant. You need to move it; it needs to be nearer the water and it will do just fine”. There are a lot of skills, especially in food growing, as you know, because if we took out all the foreign plants we would have very few vegetables. The growing skills and the connections are there. We should make much more of sharing and promoting skills among those who have now lost them because they are in urban areas, and with children who grow up without access to greenness.
Q195 Lord Curry of Kirkharle: I would follow that to probe skills a little more. Is the issue that we are not attracting people into horticulture so that they can learn horticultural skills? Is how we encourage more people to consider horticulture an issue for schools, or is the issue the lack of provision of skills training?
Wayne Grills: In our experience, the landscape profession has had a huge issue with skills, both a lack of people coming into the industry and a lack of skills within the industry. I do not lay any blame at the door of further education on this; colleges have to follow funding routes and the routes of the education system. We know that there have been huge changes in the education system, with some 45 Education Ministers since the Second World War, and changes within that education system that do not seem, in my humble opinion, to have time to bed in to ensure that we consolidate what we are implementing. That is crucial, as we move forward with apprenticeships and T-levels. We have to make sure that we do a very good job with employers for them to understand T-levels, first and foremost, as most employers would have an idea of apprenticeships, if only from history.
Without a shadow of a doubt we are struggling as an industry. We need to put the right things into the education system to make sure that we get the right people. We might be jumping the gun a little bit to the last question for the session, but my ask is to improve the education system to make sure that we have horticulture and landscaping as part of the curriculum. That is the only way that we will embed this. There are particular skills in our industry that tap into STEM subjects. We have mathematics, technology and science, and I would change the engineering aspect to “environmental”. So I would ask for a horticulture STEM subject area.
We have huge opportunities as an industry to move forward. We know from the work that we did in the Environmental Horticulture Group that this industry was revalued in 2019 at just shy of £29 billion, and the forecast for 2030 could be that we are almost at £42 billion of GDP.
The Chair: Can I follow that? On T-level qualifications, we took evidence on Tuesday that there was a problem in the horticultural sector and there was a disjoint in moving across to the new qualifications. Is that something that you are coming across?
Wayne Grills: That is certainly some of the experience that we are hearing about, but there is a huge piece of work to be done to make sure employers understand what they are and what value they can play, because a huge change is going on. It took probably 20 years to embed the NVQ system so that employers understood what they were getting from somebody coming out of college with an NVQ and what they were able to do. If we are not careful, we will have the same issue with T-levels. That is my humble opinion, but I have worked in the education sector for a few decades now and have seen that at first hand.
Q196 Lord Watson of Wyre Forest: Wayne, you highlighted in your opening remarks the multiplicity of benefits of green urban spaces. Can I move you on to the challenges? You have identified an inadequately skilled workforce as a key challenge, but can you tell us what other challenges your members tell you they have in the design, planning and creation of green urban spaces?
Wayne Grills: Thank you for that; it is a great question. Understanding the recreational and cultural usage of parks and green spaces is a huge challenge, and it can vary across the country from one local authority to another or from one park to another. With budgets already under strain, understanding the full value of green spaces is paramount to the proper planning and funding requirements to maximise that green-space potential. That is where we are struggling, on a local authority level, to understand that the restriction in budgets over the last decade has had a real impact on those green spaces and the benefits that they can provide. That could be enhanced so much with the right planning and maintenance of those areas, to come back to maintenance.
Q197 Lord Watson of Wyre Forest: Can I take Patricia and Judy back a little bit? In our previous evidence session we heard that access to land to grow is a problem in some deprived areas. Every member of this committee, apart from me, has green fingers, and my journey into horticulture might be guerrilla gardening. Could you advise me on how I become a guerrilla gardener without getting arrested?
Patricia Wallace: Incredible Edible would say that it is better to seek forgiveness than permission. You just get on with it, because it is very difficult to determine who owns these pieces of land, in some cases. In other cases, you knew who owns it but they are just cutting grass on it and not doing anything productive with it.
I stopped at a very busy junction in a town recently to look at a house that had a wonderful wisteria growing like a curtain around the window. When I got out, the gardener had also expanded out into the piece of ground beside his house. It was like something that you would have seen in Chelsea; it was such a boost to that neighbourhood. People have an enthusiasm, and local authorities and public landowners need to catch up with them to ask how we can capture and harness this enthusiasm: if you want to go and plant in your local area, how do we support you, rather than put a barrier up?
We talked about horticultural skills. To add to that, we are looking for courses in agroecology and regenerative growing. Someone mentioned earlier: how do you ensure that allotmenteers use organic methods? You cannot, but you can if you offer courses and show people that they can be productive in a way that is also kind to and enhances nature. Our permaculture experts and our agroecologists need support to run these courses and influence all the community gardening that is going on. To the question that you asked, we need to look at the transfer of public land to community management.
The Chair: Can I ask a question on that? We are doing the No Mow May, as are a lot of councils. Is that something that you see expanding?
Patricia Wallace: Yes. If I mow in my garden, there are no hares. I have a sandy site that is not very productive without a lot of humus added to it, but it is full of wildlife and pollinators. Most people who practise No Mow May start to see all of those bugs, bees, birds and mammals arrive in their gardens. If you do that, you are just delighted, so you will follow that into May and June—I hope.
Wayne Grills: We have seen and promoted No Mow May as part of the industry but, from our perspective, it has to be managed very well. A prime example would be on highways. If you have grass verges that could be impinging drainage, for instance, that could cause flooding and accidents. It has to be a managed process and not just left to go completely wild.
We talked about the challenges for the industry. From our point of view, the answer is about putting green space on an even-keel footing with the built environment. A lot of priority is placed on the built environment that we do not see in green spaces. That is our answer.
Judy Ling Wong: On the land side, I would mention the Multifunctional Landscapes report by the Royal Society. It was very much aimed at foresters and farmers but it could easily conceptually be aimed at the urban environment so that we look much harder at all the concreted spaces and ask what we do with them as a multifunctional landscape: can we transform them, even in the smallest way, imaginatively?
We have seen some imaginative councils do things with very wide pavements. They allow the community to take up some paving stones and plant in a very small spot, which allows continuity. There have been areas where these small spots in wide pavements have formed a trail in the community and have been a source of enormous pride. Some councils realised that you do not walk on the bit of the pavement between the trees, so they took up all the paving stones between the trees but you can still walk on the pavement. Although these things seem very small, they add up. The idea of a multifunctional space in the urban landscape is equally important to the reconfiguration of all the land where people are rethinking, “We’re just growing crops for agriculture; are there bits where we can grow different things?” Allowing the community access to those different bits is very important.
I want to come back to jobs, because I chair the green apprenticeships and technical education advisory group based at the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education, and support the green jobs delivery taskforce. On that front, I am constantly pushing the process of awareness and aspiration for jobs. It is all very well having very high-quality apprenticeship standards, but what if a schoolchild cannot name any green jobs? They are links in a chain. It is a chain process: one missing link and the whole process fails.
I was talking to friends who work in education and are early years specialists. They say that there are opportunities that we are not taking up. Nurseries and infant schools have to have resources such as dressing up—for example, as a doctor. Why is there no dressing up as a park-keeper? Children are conscious very early on that there are certain jobs in the world. As they get to the age of eight, they begin to be able to name a number of jobs that they can understand, although some jobs are very complex. For example, the horticultural and green industries are crying out for data analysts to help them advance. That is complicated. You might introduce that idea later, when young people are aged about 13 or 14. You have to have a system where children are aware of what is available to them in the world. You can drip-feed a number of jobs through the years so that, when they get to 16, they are not bombarded by careers officers saying what they can do, and they can only say, “What? What on earth are these things?” Instead, they would have an awareness of a real choice of jobs because we had built awareness into the education system.
The opportunities are often very simple and very powerful. The DfE recently launched a project called nature park, to increase access to knowledge about and awareness of nature. It is online so that more people can do it, such as schools that do not have green spaces. I asked why the DfE did not add lines into that resource pack that, beside loving nature, you can work for it. It is as simple as that. Three lines would do it and all the schoolchildren would hear it. You could have links to websites where there are videos of people doing things. I have urged the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education to increase its number of videos called “A Day in the Life of”. All these things link up.
The Chair: I can remember reading Percy the Park Keeper to all my children.
Q198 Baroness Jones of Whitchurch: I want to change the subject slightly and focus with you, Wayne, on biodiversity net gain. Your members must be at the forefront of implementing the biodiversity net gain policies. How are you going about it? Do you think it will be an effective policy? For example, the thinking at the heart of biodiversity net gain is that if there is a new housing development, or any development, you will replace the damage that you have done to any green space within the curtail of the development itself and provide biodiversity on that site. If you cannot do that, you move it along a bit and do it somewhere else in the neighbourhood. Are your members embracing all of that? Is it working? what advice are you giving to make sure that they do it properly?
Wayne Grills: Where do I start? Biodiversity net gain has the potential to arrest the decline in urban green space but relies on watertight governance mechanisms. For example, it seems that there is a lack of investment to achieve a full biodiversity assessment to assess advancement against, say, a 12 month benchmark rather than just the one day that the ecologists might be on site to assess what is happening that day. You have to take a period and look at a consistent approach to understand whether there is true net gain in that same way. The maintenance of those green spaces—I promised you that there would be a theme today—is essential in maintaining the biodiversity aspect and stopping the green space deteriorating.
We should not rely solely on volunteers, which a lot of our sector does. That does not take away from the very important part that those volunteers play. They are absolutely crucial, but we have to look much more as a profession at the whole gambit of net gain and how we are going about it. The planning policy framework can be improved in that same way to ensure that we are planning properly, and that it is executed in the right way and maintained thereafter.
I come back to my point that we put things in place for the built environment—for buildings—but we do not put the same emphasis on the green infrastructure that surrounds them, especially as to whether there is enough of that green infrastructure, particularly in the housing developments that are going up now. There is concern about that and there are other issues wrapped around it, such as soil quality and things like that. The British Standard suggests that the first three metres from a house is British topsoil. However, if there is enough room in that garden, we would put decking or paving over that really good soil and the rest would be full of builders’ rubble and things like that. We have a lot of work to do to make sure that we are truly advancing on biodiversity net gain and measuring it in such a way that we can say that we have done our job and that we have improved it by X%, rather than just, “We will see a 10% gain if we do X, Y and Z”.
Baroness Jones of Whitchurch: Do you find that your members—the trendy landscapers—are still decking and building over what should be green space? We watch garden programmes and that often seems to be what is happening. Are your members embracing biodiversity a bit more?
Wayne Grills: I am sure that they will be flattered that you think they are trendy. It is about working with and educating clients. As an industry, we have spoken about whether we have a rating for gardens, in the same way that we do for buildings or the white goods in our kitchens. As members of the public, we may make a conscious decision, if we want a new refrigerator, that we will have one that has an A++ rating, or I could go out and I buy one that has a C or a D rating. We could potentially have something very similar for our gardens. That would mean that there would be a greater biodiversity gain within those gardens that might be, to all intents and purposes, A++.
Q199 Lord Sahota: We are coming up to the last question. Are you aware of any examples from the UK or overseas of successful green urban planning policies?
Wayne Grills: Shall I start? Sorry, I am dominating this. To go abroad for a second, we see a great deal coming through from China. BALI has a national award ceremony each year and receives a phenomenal number of entries from China. They are thought out; it is between nature, architecture and engineering to resource power, cooling, flooding, and connectivity with citizens. The finance and business district of Amsterdam is another good example.
A bit closer to home, Bicester in Oxfordshire is to double in size over the next 15 years. Planners have planned high-quality, multifunctional green and blue infrastructure. The key there, as I said before, is making sure that that comes to fruition. Similarly, our own Olympic park was the pinnacle of the planning and landscape industry and horticulture coming together and working together. That is probably one of the best examples that we have had in the UK for many years.
Patricia Wallace: In Wales, there is a drive for an overarching green infrastructure handbook to support local authorities and planners. That is a good way of looking at the whole raft of our urban horticulture and how it fits into the planning process.
You are the legislators here. The little humble community garden or allotment, which provides so many benefits for communities and their environment, needs protection. There have been lots of calculations about natural capital and people not turning up to the health service because they have the allotment or the community garden as a lifeline, but when you try to monetise it or put figures on it, capitalism will always win because if jobs, development and houses are in competition, the community garden does not equate. Therefore, protection is needed within planning.
Biodiversity net gain is a step but it needs enforcement; it needs teeth. Some of these habitats are not replaceable within the site: once they are gone, they are gone. How do you work around that? We have to be clever; we have to have community-led planning, with input from our best minds as to how we work with and protect nature, and have a biodiversity gain in the long term.
Judy Ling Wong: The urban planning factor in the new London Plan is very important, because it allows a way to score what is happening in green infrastructure. It will be very effective because it is about approaching how to control what development is doing by making visible what they are doing out front. The urban planning factor comes from Berlin, which is very innovative; its people make policy and do not wait. That is something to look to: to look hard at the city of Berlin and what it is doing. The urban planning factor is very important.
The Chair: Does anybody want to ask a final question before I come in?
Q200 Lord Watson of Wyre Forest: Could I take you back to Baroness Jones’s point about the role of your members? As the person on the committee who cannot grow anything when the rest can, I look at the new piece of garden that I have and feel that I have contradictory advice: do I leave it to be a wildlife sanctuary or turn it into an edible garden? I could do with a shed but I do not want another hard surface because I need to drain the water. There is a lot of consumer confusion about where to go. On the idea of industry standards, do you try to give your members an overarching policy framework—that there are certain things that they should try to achieve with their clients rather than just being guided by the client? Do you see the point that I am trying to make? You probably feel the confusion as well. Is there a way that garden designers can help us new home owners become better environmentalists?
Wayne Grills: Yes, there is. This is why I refer to educating the clients on what they have. By the way, there are other solutions to your garden shed; it does not have to be hardstanding.
While there is not a solid framework for that in that same way, there is guidance. We run articles, webinars, workshops et cetera on how that can be bettered. We have a sustainability group working across a range of organisations within the industry looking at exactly that, and at whole-life carbon systems of products and things like that. The industry is doing its bit, without a shadow of a doubt. We have to do that to make sure that the client understands what they are getting involved with.
Lord Watson of Wyre Forest: Is there a role for the Government in setting standards for the sector?
Wayne Grills: It would depend on what standards we are talking about, but absolutely. There would be some benefit to that because everybody would know the standard that they would have to achieve, but it depends which areas we are talking about.
Q201 The Chair: Thank you. I get to ask the final question. Could I ask you to be very brief and to the point, for the clerks? If you want one thing from the Government, what would it be? Following on from Lord Watson, I grow a lot of things, but I kill a lot more.
Judy Ling Wong: I would like the Government to strategically consider the infrastructure that can make a change. There is an opportunity with the green spaces and parks, and the fact they have 7,000 friends groups. They are volunteers and it is free. What if you strategically trained one skilled person in each location and got them to go into schools? Imagine that schools’ green spaces are part of the green-space picture, for children to enjoy growing beautiful sunflowers and so on, and drip-feed the kind of thinking that we need for a sustainable future while they are enjoying it.
Patricia Wallace: The legislation has to be widened out. The only legislation on community growing is on allotments, and it goes back to 1932. Legislation has to catch up with and recognise all the other types of growing that are going on.
Then, the process of the release of public land for community food growing has to be oiled. That should not take years; that is why you get people guerrilla gardening. That process should be there for people to use; it should be open and transparent. If a piece of land is not being used, it could be put to productive use. We should not have so many meanwhile sites, because people put their life and soul into these areas and then something happens: they go up for development and disappear. They need protection. Our ask would be for community asset transfer of land.
Wayne Grills: I come back to my earlier ask, which is for horticulture to be placed on the national curriculum from primary through to further and higher education.
To put a second one in, I would ask for the National Careers Service to understand the industry far better to be able to promote what we have to offer: our career pathways and the great opportunities in our industry. Let me give you a quick example: when my son was choosing his options at school and I went to the school evening, we sat through a presentation from the school. I found out that horticulture was in the same category as dentists and pharmacists. It did not have a category of its own. It is not recognised within our education system. It is not even recognised as a separate industry within the Health and Safety Executive. That is a huge failing that we need to address so that it has the necessary importance placed on it.
Patricia Wallace: Horticulture needs to be valued more. In Northern Ireland, we have just written a report with 11 local councils. We spent 18 months on it. It is a benchmark standard for the amount of land that should be set aside for community growing. We recommend around one-third of an acre for every 1,000 households. If you can set a standard that local authorities can work to and achieve—not a standard that is unachievable—then, as Judy said, we can get on with it and try to get there in the next few years, rather than waiting for years and years for policies to come through. We need the policy coming top down to meet the demand coming up from local communities.
The Chair: Could you give the clerks a copy of that report? That would be fantastic. Thank you. We are just time; you were very brief. Thank you for coming. That is the end of the session.