Public Access to Nature

Debate between Lloyd Russell-Moyle and Caroline Lucas

Thursday 18th May 2023 Commons Chamber

[Caroline Lucas]

Indeed, the hon. Member anticipates my very next point. She is exactly right: the benefits of being in nature are not limited to our physical health; they very much affect our mental health as well, easing anxiety and increasing positive emotions. Spending time in nature has been proven fundamental to good mental health. Indeed, the growth in green social prescribing shows that that is increasingly being recognised more widely.

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle (Brighton, Kemptown) (Lab/Co-op)]

Does the hon. Lady agree that part of the problem with health and income inequalities is that access to nature is not equally distributed in this country? Some of the wealthiest constituencies have far greater access to nature than some of the poorest. That goes along with the historic theft of land by the very wealthiest—facilitated by this place—who stole it from the poorest communities. That has never been properly readdressed.

[Caroline Lucas]

I agree very much with that point. Inequalities go right through from start to finish in terms of access to the countryside, and I will say more about that, but he also rightly points to the fact that this is nothing new; this is part of a history of land grabbing that has been going on from the enclosures onwards, if not before that. It is something that we need to address if we are serious about wealth inequalities in this country as well as health inequalities, because unless we address the issue of the distribution of land, we are not going to solve that problem.

There is economic sense in increasing access to nature, too. Figures suggest that the NHS could save around £3 billion in treatment costs every year if everyone had access to good-quality green space. Despite the importance of access to nature to the nation’s health, and that significance only being underlined throughout the covid pandemic and subsequent lockdowns, there is no national strategy for ensuring that everyone can enjoy access to nature. My first question to the Minister is whether she will look to rectify that and to direct and co-ordinate policy action and resources across Government.

As the hon. Member for Brighton, Kemptown (Lloyd Russell-Moyle) set out, we know that access to nature remains incredibly unequal, and covid underlined that. Black people and people of colour, as well as poorer households, are far less likely to live close to green space. Friends of the Earth research suggests that 40% of people from ethnic minority backgrounds live in the most green space-deprived areas, compared with just 14% of white people.

While I welcome the Government’s goal outlined in their environmental improvement plan to enhance engagement with the natural environment and the commitment that everyone should live within a 15-minute walk of a green or blue space, the Minister will know that, as it stands, that commitment is not legally binding. It urgently needs to be accompanied by ambitious legislation, together with funding for local authorities to help achieve it.

[Caroline Lucas]

I thank the hon. Member for her intervention and very much agree with the point she makes. Local authorities have a vital role to play, and yet their budgets have been slashed over the past 13 years.

To return to the issue of how the lack of access has played out in different constituencies, new research by the Wildlife and Countryside Link shows that in more than one in 10 neighbourhoods, between 90% and 100% of the population currently have no access to nature within a 15-minute walk. The Right to Roam campaign recently calculated that 92 constituencies in England currently have no right to roam at all, with many more than that having very little access.

The Minister might be aware that when the Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill was going through the Commons, I tabled an amendment on Report that would have created a right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment and required public authorities to increase equitable access to nature. That call is backed by the public, with 80% of people wanting to see a legal right to local nature. With that Bill now going through the Lords, I urge the Minister and the Government to pick up my amendment and show the level of ambition that is needed.

I know that Ministers are, rightly, extremely proud of the English coastal path and the establishment of the coast-to-coast national trail. I welcome these efforts, which undoubtedly improve ease of access, but I am concerned that they do not begin to address the scale of the challenge at hand—not least because, for example, much of the English coastal path, which involves essentially a pretty thin strip of land along the coast, was already accessible through existing rights of way. The coast-to-coast route has long been an unofficial long-distance path linking east and west coasts across northern England. Last year it was designated as an official national trail, but as a result, it needs to be better signposted, better maintained and better publicised.

The bottom line is that much more needs to be done to improve public access to nature. As such, I urge the Government to look closely at other proposals, such as giving national park authorities a range of new purposes, including one to improve people’s connection to nature, which would also implement a key proposal from the Glover review of protected landscapes. Will the Minister look again at embedding public access into the new environmental land management schemes, which would help farmers to create more opportunities for people to enjoy the outdoors? Will the Government remove the new 2031 deadline for recording historic rights of way? The reimposition of that artificial deadline risks losing thousands of footpaths.

Will the Government urgently conduct a mapping review of existing open access land? Ministers have tabled a further amendment to the Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill to defer that review until the end of 2030, which is more than 25 years after the first maps were produced, despite a legal requirement that they be updated every 10 years. Will the Minister bring forward new funding for local authorities to maintain public rights of way? Finally, will the Government support local councils and national park authorities to improve access to the countryside for everyone, including those with disabilities and those who do not own or have access to a car? For both those groups of people, much of the countryside remains out of reach—a situation that has undoubtedly been exacerbated by cuts to local bus services.

Having said that, I am just going to give a quick shout-out to the Brighton & Hove bus company and its “Breeze up to the Downs” service—I am sure the hon. Member for Brighton, Kemptown will agree. That service is supported by the council, the National Trust and the South Downs National Park Authority. Those kinds of models, which enable people to get into the countryside affordably and easily if they do not have a car, need to be supported. I will also use this opportunity to congratulate the former Green administration in Brighton and Hove, which blazed a trail with its transformative city downland estate plan. That plan contains commitments to consider proposals to designate every site under the council’s management as statutory open access land.

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle]

The hon. Lady raises an important point about the ability for councils to use their own estate. Is she looking forward to the exciting plans that we might have in Lewes, as I am?

[Caroline Lucas]

I am indeed looking forward to exciting plans in Lewes, and I pay tribute to local councillors there.

However, we must go further to truly transform our relationship with nature, with access to wilder spaces where we can marvel at the wonders around us and be fully immersed in the natural world. Those who organised the mass trespass of Kinder Scout in 1932, which so many of us have taken so much inspiration from, knew the value of access to our dramatic Peak district, and their actions united the campaign for access to the countryside.

At the start of this millennium, the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000 finally gave us a right to roam in certain areas, over mountain, moor, heath and down, designating them as open access land. However, that designation still covers only 8% of land in England, and much of it is remote. Too often, tracts of legally accessible open country land lack any legal means for the public to cross other land to access them, rendering them effectively off limits. Just 3% of rivers in England and Wales are accessible, and even that is only provided by voluntary agreements with landowners and can therefore be taken away.

That is why last year, I tabled a Bill that would have extended the right to roam to woods, rivers, green-belt land and more grassland. In doing so, it would have provided access to nature on people’s doorsteps, as those landscapes are found in almost every community, and it would have extended access to approximately 30% of English land. Since I drafted that Bill, the momentum behind the campaign for access to nature has only grown, and I believe now is the time to be even bolder and more ambitious. It is time for a reset of our very relationship with the natural world around us, one that re-establishes the intimacy and connection that is essential if we are to restore the state of our—quite often literally—scorched earth.

I believe it is time to expand our minds and our horizons and look north of the border to Scotland, where the Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003 enshrined the right of access to most land and water, providing that the right is exercised responsibly. Of course, there will be some sensible exclusions such as fields where crops are growing, seasonal restrictions for sensitive nature sites, school playing fields and even gardens. However, that is essentially a much more expansive approach. It designates a universal right to roam with exclusions carved out, rather than the opposite approach that is taken in England, which is based on a universal exclusion with access only to some very specific landscapes. The Scottish approach is far simpler, meaning that we are no longer reliant on confusing and often outdated land designations that no longer reflect the nature of our countryside, and it is more equal, meaning that everyone has shared access to this island that is our home.

Elections Bill (Instruction)

Debate between Lloyd Russell-Moyle and Caroline Lucas

Instruction
Monday 20th September 2021 Commons Chamber

[Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Argyll and Bute (Brendan O’Hara).

Today, we are faced with yet another example of a Government with absolutely no respect for democracy, demonstrated both by this process and by the use of it in relation to a policy change of such huge electoral importance.

Ironically, the Minister who tabled this instruction—the hon. Member for Norwich North (Chloe Smith)—was the very Minister who recently criticised the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) for using this little-used mechanism himself. The irony is compounded not least because the hon. Gentleman used it as a Back Bencher, with few other options at his disposal, faced with a Government blatantly leaving the issue of suspending Parliament out of a Bill that should have included it. By contrast, in this case, the Government of the day are abusing parliamentary process in two ways: first, they did not give notice of this extension of the scope of the Bill; and secondly, there is no good reason for using this instruction mechanism in the first place.

That raises questions as to why this attempt to foist the undemocratic and unfair first-past-the-post electoral system on mayoral and police and crime commissioner elections was slipped in as quietly as possible. For example, why was this silently published on the day of the reshuffle? More substantively, why did the Government not include this issue in the Bill in the first place so that the principle could have been debated on Second Reading?

Frankly, the disrespectful nature of this instruction is compounded by the fact that this is an Elections Bill—a Bill of constitutional importance, which requires those in power to behave with the highest respect for due process in order to protect our democracy and trust in Government. Anything else looks like rigging the system to the Government’s own electoral advantage. Extending the use of first past the post, and stripping out the proportional aspects of mayoral and police commissioner elections are not changes that should be bounced on MPs of other parties with no pre-legislative scrutiny or discussion.

Since 1997, every new representative body in the UK has been elected using an electoral system other than first past the post. We have had two decades of experience with PR systems in devolved Assemblies, mayoralties and local government. Now, suddenly, we have this blatant abuse of parliamentary procedure to allow the Government to scrap the PR systems that we have. Instead of the surreptitious use of this last-minute instruction, we should have had pre-legislative scrutiny so that we could properly explore on a cross-party basis the serious concerns that first past the post is unfair, unrepresentative and undemocratic. It is unfair and unrepresentative because it regularly delivers powers to those who win only a minority of the popular vote, ignoring the number of votes cast for smaller parties, and undemocratic because it promotes voter inequality, giving disproportionate power to swing voters in marginal seats and encouraging the belief that voting never changes anything, which is dangerous for participation in our democracy.

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle (Brighton, Kemptown) (Lab/Co-op)]

The hon. Lady, my friend and neighbour, is making a very good set of points around why we need a more proportional, not less proportional, system in our voting system more broadly. Does she share my concern that Ministers have been grilled, questioned and interrogated over a number of years on the clauses in the Bill in the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Select Committee, on which I sit, and the fact that this has been brought in without PACAC being able to consider the issue beforehand with the Minister is an example of this Government undermining the Committee system as well?

[Caroline Lucas]

Of course, I absolutely agree with my constituency neighbour; this just smacks of deceitfully slipping it out so that the provision cannot have the proper scrutiny that it deserves.

When we teach young people about what the suffragettes went through to get the vote for women and how important it was to vote, it really would help if we could tell them that we had a system now where their vote actually counted. That means that the Government of the day should be treating any change in the law on our voting systems with the respect that it deserves. The fact that the Government are not going to through the normal due legislative process with this change rings major alarm bells. Second Reading debates exist for good reason; they are a high-profile part of the scrutiny process, and I can see no good reason why we were not allowed to scrutinise this outrageous proposal then. How different it would feel if we had a Government who were pluralist, open, willing to engage in dialogue with all people and parties, and willing to improve our democracy with a commitment to fairness and to increasing wellbeing for all citizens.

In May, the Tories lost 11 of 13 mayoral elections, all under the supplementary vote system, which allows voters to express their top two preferences. Now they want to change these elections to first past the post, but without any normal scrutiny. We can only conclude that they are seeking to do this unfair thing in an unfair way because they understand that when elections are fair, they tend to lose.