Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 27th October 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I very much support by noble friend’s Amendment 96, which we will likely hear about in due course. This is really important for the harmonious development of communities and them working well for people. But if we are going to have that then we absolutely need Amendment 88 too. As the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, has just pointed out, if we do not make a clear requirement for green space then it gets swallowed up.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I will speak chiefly to Amendment 121E in my name. It has not been addressed yet, but it is very much a package with two amendments that have already been widely addressed: Amendment 107 on playing fields, from the noble Lord, Lord Addington, and Amendment 88 on blue and green spaces, from the noble Baroness, Lady Willis. These three amendments fit together.

My amendment, which is the same as the one that I tabled in Committee, seeks to ensure that planning authorities take all practicable steps to ensure a sufficiency of play opportunities for children. As the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, just said, we desperately need playing fields for organised sport and we need green and blue spaces, but somewhere to just kick a ball around is not necessarily a playing field and yet it is a crucial space for children to develop their physical skills—as the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, spoke about—and social skills, by getting together to play.

I spoke quite extensively in Committee and I do not intend to repeat everything I said. I will pick up and take forward a couple of points that were raised then. I begin by apologising to the Minister, who made great efforts to reach out and have a meeting with me before Report. I am afraid his emails arrived just beforehand. I was in Ukraine, with limited communications, and it is entirely my fault that that meeting did not happen; I apologise for that. Those were the circumstances.

This is not really my amendment at all. In Committee, the noble Lord, Lord Addington, asked where it had come from and I said that it came from Play England. It is worth tracing through this a little. The 2024 manifesto from Play England was the first to call for play sufficiency legislation. In Committee, the Minister referred to the NPPF change that came in December 2024, but, as we have heard from multiple noble Lords, there is no evidence that it is working. Further, that is a policy, which could be changed, which is very different from having it written into law—which is much harder to change—that planning authorities must consider play sufficiency.

As I said in Committee, this was debated quite extensively by the standards of the other place, and there were broad expressions of support. I am afraid that nothing the Minister said in Committee convinced me that there was any argument against this. I note that the noble Lord asked in Committee if I was aware that there is an APPG on Play. I am—I am a member of the APPG on Play, together with eight other Members of your Lordships’ House, including several from the Government Benches, and 32 MPs. By the standards of these things, that makes it a significant all-party group, which is a recognition of the importance in which this issue is held.

A number of noble Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Miller, among them, referred to the Wildlife and Countryside Link study which came out this morning about the lack of green spaces where first-time buyers make their first homes. Of course, many of those first-time buyers may well have or be going to have children, who desperately need these play spaces. I note that the paper edition of the Times this morning put beside that the report from the House of Lords environment committee, which I think is out this morning and which talks about how, if the Government are to build new towns, they need to be built as communities, with infrastructure in place. Part of that infrastructure must be play infrastructure.

I referred in Committee to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and to the fact that Wales and Scotland already have comparable legislation to this. It is worth noting that Wales has the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act, which almost demands that you have something like a play sufficiency duty.