Playgrounds

Alex Norris Excerpts

Wednesday 8th January 2025 Westminster Hall

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government (Alex Norris)]

It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair for the first time, Mrs Lewell-Buck. I know that you are always fair, but I know that you can be hard as well, if need be—hopefully I will not stretch the Chair’s patience today.

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth East (Tom Hayes) for securing this debate and for the way in which he has led it. He took us on a beautiful tour of Bournemouth, but I most enjoyed the way that he brought the views of his constituents into the room and on to the record—to get 640 responses to anything is quite something. It shows the amount of energy and interest in Bournemouth, but clearly, judging from the contributions of colleagues, that energy and interest is replicated across the country.

Playgrounds are a vital part of our social infrastructure. As we have heard, they contribute to the health and development of our children and young people across the nation. Importantly for us as a Government, they also build on our mission of opportunities for all by ensuring that everyone has the best start in life.

I pay special tribute to the parents who my hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth East referred to, and I commend them for the insights that they gave to him and that he has been able to give to us. I also recognise Councillors Millie Earl, Sandra Moore and Andy Hadley, and Rebecca Whelan-Edmonds and Barbara Uphoff, for their work on a play strategy in Bournemouth —there is clearly something very special going on in the area—and Councillor Sharon Carr-Brown for her work to improve the quality of play in her ward and beyond.

I also thank Eugene Minogue and Play England for its work, including the support it has given to Bournemouth and to my hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth East. He asked me some specific questions, which I will come to later, but I will first pick up on a couple of the themes that were echoed by other hon. Members.

First, it is important to start with the principle that unstructured, free play is important in child development. Fun in general is important—it is not all about development; children have to be able to enjoy themselves and we need to make sure that the spaces are there. We have a strong, able and technically evolved competitor for our children’s education: screen time is part of this conversation. The answer in such circumstances is never to smash the machines; we cannot unlearn the technology, so we have to compete. If the alternative is compelling, our offer must be compelling. I will make a couple more points on that later. At a time when the cost of living challenges mean that parents are making difficult choices, those offers have to be there and they have to be accessible.

My hon. Friend and a number of other hon. Members said that this is also about social justice. For many in my community, the Bulwell Forest is their garden. They do not have the garden of their own, so that is their play area, as my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing Southall (Deirdre Costigan) said. As my hon. Friend the Member for Ilford South (Jas Athwal) said, play and parks should be a great leveller and accessible to all—just walk up and pitch in. Too often, however, that is not the case for children with a disability, as my hon. Friend the Member for Thurrock (Jen Craft) said, nor is it for neurodiverse children, as my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford (Leigh Ingham) said. Whatever plans we bring forward, we have to weave in accessibility. We need to seek to tackle those inequalities.

I will make a few points on where we are as a Government and address the questions from my hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth East. The early years of childhood are crucial for the healthy development of our children, and physical activity is at the root of that, but as the hon. Member for Leicester South (Shockat Adam) said, we face a real challenge around childhood obesity. Over 2 million children in this country do not do 60 minutes of physical activity each day—that problem is coming down the line for us. I will of course meet with the hon. Gentleman to talk about the adventure playgrounds in his community.

We know that this is a social justice issue, as I said, because the levels of activities are lowest among the poorest children, children from ethnic minority backgrounds and girls. Factors such as poverty, lack of access to safe green spaces and poor local natural resources contribute to this inequality. We also know that parents are increasingly concerned about the welfare of their children and about antisocial behaviour, which plays into the Government’s crime mission. We have to make sure that we have community policing to give reassurance.

The lack of physical activity among children needs to change, and active play is one of the key ways that we can make that change and get children exercising, stretching their minds and, as the hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell (Helen Maguire) said, building skills, problem solving and building resilience—all of those come through active play. Whether it is at adventure playgrounds, sports facilities or park playgrounds, or in the natural environment, all those things need to be present and accessible for our children.

We have a lot of parks and green spaces in this country —27,000 of them. They are much-loved local assets and can provide opportunities for free. As has been said, that reflects the cost of living. The great thing is that our children are telling us the answer. As so often in politics, if we stop talking for long enough, generally people will tell us the answer. The 2024 children’s people and nature survey for England tells us that the single most important factor for encouraging children to go outside is access to playgrounds. We tear our hair out about why our children are not out more often, which comes up in debates, as hon. Members have said, but the answer is there ready for us—access to playgrounds.

Local authorities are at the root of this. Five in every six of our urban parks are managed by local authorities. The hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) talked about community power. The local authority’s connection to local communities is about empowering them; I have no desire, as the Minister, to make granular decisions about play parks in Stoke, Stockport, Bournemouth, Thurrock, Ealing or wherever. I have very strong views about Nottingham, but my role as Minister is to get the powers and the resources to those communities to shape things for themselves.

The hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell talked about some of the pressure that councils have been under in recent years. There is no doubt that playgrounds have been seen as a discretionary, non-statutory service. As a result, we have seen the decline that she talked about. I am very proud that the recent Budget had the best settlement for local government, with significant resources being made available. That will start to see some of those important services being built back.

I am passionate about, and could speak all day on, the Green Flag award scheme, and I thank super-judge Chris Worman for the work that he is doing. That is a really good way of ensuring that we have quality offerings, of which we have over 2,000 in the UK. In the Department we have novated the parks working group to build on that work, and Chris is playing a big part in that. I am going to ask that group to expand to ensure that play parks and playgrounds are part of that conversation, so that we are tackling some of the inequalities and the accessibility issues.

I will address the specific asks of my hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth East. First, I would be delighted to meet Eugene Minogue from Play England to discuss the issue. I am very keen to meet my hon. Friend’s constituents, and having had the aural tour of Bournemouth, I am keen to have the physical one. With regard to the 2008 play strategy, I am going to deftly sidestep any historical comparisons to individual politicians and say that as part of our opportunities Government mission, we are working with sector experts around play provision and will build on what has been done in the past. I steal liberally from what has been done before—often there is not much that is genuinely new—so we will building on that strategy and making significant reference to it in our work, while making it fit for the modern day.

We are going to take a similar approach with regard to play sufficiency legislation. I want to follow the evidence with the experts in communities, and I want to understand more about Scotland and Wales, because there is clearly a distinction and difference there, and about where the law could augment that. I would not want to run ahead of that work. My officials are working with those in the Department for Culture, Media and Sport to look further into sports fields, and I will keep my hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth East updated.

On mapping play facilities, we want to get the burden on local authorities right so that we do not put too much on them. We are looking at other ways of doing it, however, because it is an important goal. One of the biggest driving factors beyond quality is distance. My community is a former mining community, so we have lots of country parks and people think that we are well provided for, but the gates are never on our side, which is a cause of great frustration. It is therefore about ensuring that we know what the distances are, as well as being about access. There is a significant correlation between mental health across the population and the distance to green and open spaces.

Rather than asking local authorities to map play facilities, last August the Office for National Statistics produced work on access to green space for the first time, and we are committed to further refining that work to ensure that it is doing the job. Similarly, the Green Flag award scheme provides a map of where the highest-quality facilities are. We are keen to get that mapping right, and to ensure that we understand that equity piece and which communities may need greater support.

I am conscious that my hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth East will need some time to wind up. I look forward to meeting him and his constituents, and I look forward to working with hon. Members in the spirit referred to by the Opposition spokesperson, the hon. Member for Hamble Valley (Paul Holmes), and by other hon. Members throughout the debate.