Health Promotion Bill [HL]

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 2nd December 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I rise to make the range of cross-party and indeed non-party support for this Bill even broader. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Addington, both for bringing it and for introducing it so comprehensively.

The noble Lord, Lord Crisp, made a powerful point when he talked about prevention of ill health; he then got to the point where we really need to be when he emphasised that physical activity is absolutely crucial to well-being and a healthy society.

Ahead of today’s debate, I looked back to a speech that I gave in July 2015 to the University of Manchester’s Festival of Public Health UK, which was in fact an international event. I said then that we have in the UK

“a society that’s making … its members ill. A society that’s failing to provide clean air … adequate housing … a healthy diet … safe jobs and decent benefits … opportunities for exercise … an education that prepares pupils for life.”

Seven years on, I do not believe that there is a single measure that I set out then on which we have seen positive progress, which is extraordinarily terrible—although I note that it is not through want of the efforts of my noble friend Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb. Indeed, this House has, with broad support, just put through the Clean Air (Human Rights) Bill. I hope that that might be one area where we could see very rapid progress.

I shall concentrate in my speech on sports—appropriately, since the noble Lord, Lord Addington, is such a champion in your Lordships’ House in this area. I stress the need to change the conversation. I was on the politicians’ panel on BBC’s 5 Live this week. For reasons that my accent makes obvious, perhaps, there was a discussion of the England-Wales World Cup game to which I was not asked to contribute. However, had I been asked to contribute, what I was sitting there bursting to say was, “Where is the huge programme around this high-profile event to get people out, during and after the event, kicking a ball around, throwing a ball around, running around, as people are watching so many high-profile celebrities doing on television now?” That was one question, but another question, which other noble Lords have already raised, is: where will people, particularly children, kick that ball? Where will they be able to run around?

I submitted a Written Question to the Cabinet Office on 24 November:

“To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the public health impacts, including on loneliness, lack of opportunities for physical activity and provision of services locally … of the sale of public buildings and spaces each year in England.”


I got the Answer a couple of days later, quite surprisingly; it perhaps suggests not a great deal of involvement. I was told:

“Any decision … will consider social cost and public value, in line with HM Treasury Green Book guidance.”


I think the noble Lord, Lord Addington, is really making a point in this Bill about the need for a change of mind in the Government: they need to regard physical activity and sport as a crucial issue, which I do not think the Answer I received suggests that they currently do.

This is not a new situation. I draw noble Lords’ attention to an interesting campaign just launched by the Carnegie UK Trust and Fields in Trust charities, with the hashtag #FieldFinders. It is looking to find lost playing fields. Between 1927 and 1935, the Carnegie UK Trust gave nearly £200,000—£10 million in today’s money—for nearly 900 playing fields across the UK. It is interesting because, as is often typical with history, it did not keep a record of where they all are, so now it is asking the public to help find them and, very interestingly, to find out how many of them are still playing fields. Because that money was given so that those fields would continue to be in use in perpetuity. I think I can guess the result: it will find that many of them will not now be playing fields.

That is focusing on playing fields, but of course the space that is very near every child, every person, is a road. Again, we have seen not government leadership in this area but civil society leadership in the form of the Play Streets campaign, which started in Bristol in 2011 and has since grown around the country. This is a scheme by which streets are temporarily but regularly closed off to become sites of play, organised and managed by people in the neighbourhood. Of course, these are not just sites of play; they are sites of interaction. What this campaign is saying is that we need a long-term culture change: it needs to be safe for children to play out on the streets all the time.

I say many radical things in your Lordships’ House; I suspect that many might regard that as the most radical, but let us think about recapturing the streets for people. That is the space we all need to be able to use freely, without danger, and, circling back to my noble friend’s Bill, in a clean air environment. That would be a huge step towards a radical society and one which, as the Bill of the noble Lord, Lord Addington, makes clear, is absolutely a government responsibility.