Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Baroness Boycott Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 27th October 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer (LD)]

My Lords, I rise to speak to Amendment 88, to which I have added my name. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Willis, for all her work on this, and the Minister and the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, for meeting us to talk about this amendment.

Without this amendment putting green and blue spaces on a statutory basis, this will be a planning Bill for the privileged. We have heard evidence from the noble Baroness, Lady Willis, this afternoon as to why this might be. There is also further evidence discovered by Wildlife and Countryside Link, which conducted regression model analysis, using official ONS datasets, for first-time buyers by local authority area in 2023. It compared this with the ONS data on the number of adults in each authority who were first-time buyers. First-time buyers are the people who will need green and blue space the most; they will have young families. Wildlife and Countryside Link analysed and mapped the percentage rate for those first-time buyers with in-depth green-space data. It found a direct, statistically significant correlation between lack of green space and higher numbers of first-time buyers. In other words, the first-time buyers are going somewhere because it is cheap: it lacks green space, it lacks amenities, so of course, things are cheaper. That is exactly what this Bill should be resisting.

When we met, the Minister said that she did not like this amendment because it was too prescriptive. She is right that local development plans should decide what green and blue spaces there should be; I do not have a problem with that. However, if there is no statutory requirement for a network of easily accessible green spaces, there will be far fewer of those spaces. This amendment is absolutely in line with Defra’s stated aims, and it would contribute substantially to sustainable urban drainage delivery. It would not tie the hands of local or regional planning authorities; it just points them in the right direction and makes sure they head in that direction. I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Goldsmith, and his colleagues will bear in mind that swift bricks and other nature-friendly construction methods will not result in more swifts unless the network of green and blue spaces exists to provide food sources.

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 88 in the names of the noble Baroness, Lady Willis, and various other Peers. I also very much support the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Addington, and my noble friend Lady Grey-Thompson about sports fields. I just wanted to make a few points that somehow often do not come up about green spaces.

In 2008, when I worked for the then Mayor of London, Mr Johnson, we started a project called Capital Growth. It was a simple and madly ambitious idea to create 2,012 new community vegetable gardens in London by the time of the Olympic Games. It was a steal entirely from Vancouver, which had done something similar, but we counted each garden as one garden, whereas they counted each plot as a garden, so I think we won. In four years, we created 2,500 gardens, and all of them are still there. Supporting the notion that a lot of these spaces do end up in much more wealthy areas, once communities were given the chance and a tiny bit of money, in fact, 78% of our gardens ended up in the most deprived areas of London, because that is what people wanted. Very many things happened that we did not anticipate. One was that all the local police came and said that the gardens had transformed the area.

To give an example, you would be in a place where there was a high-rise block and an area designed back in the 50s where mums could walk with their babies in the midday sun; but it would be full of needles and beer cans, and people would not go there. They would stay in their tower blocks because they were frightened to come down. However, you took over the space and created a garden, and then, people got pride and came down. It altered things dramatically, and we saw that over and over again. The police were pleased, the doctors were pleased, the community was pleased, and people started to take ownership of their public space.

We set up a system whereby we challenged every borough in London to create 60 spaces. They all rose to the challenge, but my point in supporting the noble Baroness’s amendment is that, if we do not make this happen, nobody has a chance. It is not something that should be the privilege of people with money; this should be accessible to all, not just because it is healthy and makes you eat better. We had wonderful groups selling to local restaurants; we were having barbecues; they were feeding kids. The knock-ons are amazing, so please do not think of it simply in terms of one single thing. The point about plants and gardens and gardening is that it spreads dramatically.

I have one final point before I sit down. I was reading an extraordinary book the other day about heat in urban areas. During the heat dome over the west coast of America, the researcher had measured the heat in the middle-class areas in Portland, Oregon, where there were lots of trees, and in the poorer areas, where there was just concrete. The difference was 20 degrees. So we must have these spaces as the world’s climate changes, because they really work a lot better than practically anything else.

[Baroness Young of Old Scone (Lab)]

My Lords, I too support Amendment 88 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Willis, to which I have put my name. This is a time of huge opportunity. We are going to be building an unprecedented number of houses and creating 10 new towns, and the value that can be added to that effort by open green spaces and blue spaces, delivering some of the benefits that have already been spoken of around the Chamber, is tremendous. It really is an opportunity we must not miss.

It is true to say that, at the moment, deprived communities do not get as good a deal on this as richer communities, and work that the Woodland Trust has done on tree equity has shown that the poorer communities have far less access to open spaces with trees. These are vital for health, mental health, well-being and air quality; we heard about heat, natural flood risk management and the huge range of things that, apart from allowing people to have room to enjoy open spaces, are also going to be delivered by these open spaces.