Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill

Baroness Willis of Summertown Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 20th February 2023 Lords Chamber

I heard the Minister, the noble Earl, Lord Howe, say in relation to a further iteration that the metrics would be revised in the light of information which came along. Well, further information is coming along about things which should in reality have been included in the first set. They do not have to wait for the second iteration to put right the things they have discovered. In fact, the essence of accountability is spotting a problem and fixing it. I put it to the Minister—I am not sure which one will respond to this group—that there is a way forward here. They can capture the high ground again by indicating that they are open to taking these debates into account before the final ministerial statement is tabled when this Bill is approved. I look forward to hearing a positive response from the Minister in due course, and to the rest of the debate.

[Baroness Willis of Summertown (CB)]

My Lords I will speak to Amendment 28 in my name and thank the noble Baronesses, Lady Parminter and Lady Jones of Whitchurch, for adding their names to it. This amendment has one simple purpose: to include in the Bill a mission on access to a healthy environment.

I will provide a few statistics to illustrate perfectly why this is necessary. A report by Public Health England in 2020 found that

“the most affluent 20% of wards in England have five times the amount of parks or general green space compared with the most deprived 10% of wards”.

Similarly, a report published by the community charity Groundwork in 2021 found that fewer than half of those with a household income of less than £15,000 reported green space within five minutes’ walk of their home, compared to two-thirds of those whose income was more than £35,000.

A 2020 Ramblers survey found that just 39% of people from ethnic minority backgrounds reported living within five minutes of a local park, field or canal path, compared to the national average of 57%—a really big gap. These and many other studies and similar reports suggest that in England we have massive inequality of access to healthy green and blue environments near to cities.

Why does this inequality in access to healthy environments in cities matter? It matters because there is an ever-increasing body of research from medical practitioners, psychiatrists and other public health authorities across the world that, even when taking into account socioeconomic factors, areas with more blue and green spaces are associated with higher health and mental well-being outcomes. These include things that cost thousands, if not millions, of pounds each year to deal with through the National Health Service, such as reduced levels of obesity, anxiety and stress-related illnesses, and lower incidences of respiratory and cardiovascular diseases.

There is more: green and blue spaces have been shown to play an important role in social cohesion, bringing communities together and reducing loneliness. They have also been shown to improve cognitive performance, especially in schoolchildren. To go back to many of the debates on the Environment Act, green spaces in cities are known to significantly reduce pollution and the effects of overheating and flooding.

If we have inequality in access to healthy environments, we have inequality in all of the benefits that these green and blue spaces provide in cities, and associated with this are really serious economic implications. For example, in a study last year, Natural England estimated that the National Health Service could save well over £2 billion a year through reduced demand if everyone in England had good access to green space. Indeed, the importance of access to green and blue space has been recognised globally. We signed up to that commitment in the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity in December 2022. The target we signed up to is to:

“Significantly increase … access to … green and blue spaces in … densely populated areas”.


Why should this mission be included in the Bill? Why can it not be delivered, as is being suggested, via other legislation such as the Environment Act and associated policies such as net biodiversity gain and the Government’s new target in their environmental improvement plan? Indeed, this target is

“to ensure that anyone can reach green or blue space within 15 minutes from their front door.”

As I hope I have made clear, access to blue and green space is far broader than just a matter for Defra and ensuring that we protect nature in cities. It is about ensuring that, via spatial planning processes, these healthy environments are in the right places for the right people, so that they can then gain the multiple benefits that many of us already have from access to these blue and green spaces. Some of these spaces, of course, may be delivered by net biodiversity gain and the environmental improvement plan, but neither of these have specific mechanisms closely aligned to the planning process which would enable targeted delivery in the areas most in need—in particular, starting with areas with the lowest incomes and the highest percentages of ethnic minorities.

If the Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill is really to deliver and reduce inequalities in England, and to achieve its missions and targets in health, well-being and even education, this is exactly the right place to include an additional mission for equality of access to high-quality blue and green space. By including this in the Bill, planners, local councils and others involved in infrastructure and planning decisions will have to properly take into consideration access to blue and green space and all the benefits that we get with that.

In summary, my amendment has the core objective of reducing inequality in access to a healthy environment by maximising the number of people who live within 15 minutes’ walk of a high-quality natural green or blue space.

[Lord Young of Cookham (Con)]

My Lords, I add a brief contribution from these Benches to the excellent speeches that have been made on Amendments 4 and 8. I say to the noble Baroness, Lady Willis, that there will be an opportunity later in the Bill to develop her arguments when we come to the amendments in the names of the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, and others about a healthy environment.

I listened to what the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, said on the first group and again on the group we are now debating, and there is a powerful case for addressing child poverty—indeed, all forms of poverty—if one is to genuinely level up. Can I say something which I hope will be helpful to the Government? I think there is a way through. If one looks at the levelling-up missions on page xvii of the executive summary of the White Paper, one will see the mission to:

“Boost productivity, pay, jobs and living standards by growing the private sector”.


It seems that if one developed that section of the mission on improving living standards and focused it directly in the way that has been suggested in Amendments 4 and 8 on children living in poverty—or, indeed, all those living in poverty—one could address the arguments that have been made.