Lord Greaves
Main Page: Lord Greaves (Liberal Democrat - Life peer)
Lord Greaves
That this House takes note of the contribution of outdoor activities to the United Kingdom economy and to the health and well-being of the population.
Lord Greaves
My Lords, this Motion is about the great outdoors. When I tabled it, I tried to include “great outdoors” in the title but the clerks thought that the term was rather colloquial and preferred not to have it. However, that is what it is all about. The previous debate in Parliament on these issues was a Commons Adjournment debate led by David Rutley MP on 5 February this year. His definition was, “adventure tourism and outdoor activities”, and that is exactly what this debate is about.
Since I have been in your Lordships’ House we have had some epic debates. A long time ago in 2000, Parliament passed the Countryside and Rights of Way Act. More recently, it passed the Marine and Coastal Access Act, and there have been many others. These are all about the great outdoors, and that is what this Motion is about today. I should declare my interests, which are my involvement in the British Mountaineering Council as a patron and in other ways, and as a vice-president of the Open Spaces Society.
The purpose of this debate is to celebrate the great outdoors, its importance to the local and national economies, and its positive effects on the health and well-being of people. I tried to put the word “people” into the Motion but the clerk said that it should be “population”. However, as far as I am concerned, it is “people”.
The great outdoors involves activities that engage the body and the mind out in the open air, ranging from gentle walks in local parks to exploring the great mountains and wilderness areas. It entails experiencing not just physical activities—you can pay a lot of money to get that in a sweaty gym if that is what you like—but landscapes, nature and open, wild places. It includes walking, climbing, mountaineering, canoeing, cycling, riding, sailing, orienteering, fell running and hang-gliding, as well as nature lovers, botanists and twitchers, and even field sports, although I would draw the line at hunting. I apologise for any that I have missed out. It encompasses walking in the local park, flying kites, cycling across urban trails, winter mountaineering in Scotland and extreme sports that some of us have never heard of. Some are very organised and highly commercialised; others involve voluntary activities in local clubs, rambling groups, mountaineering groups and cycling clubs, but the great majority involve individuals, friends and families going into the countryside and doing their own thing.
What is the value of this activity? Inevitably in a debate such as this, we have been deluged by statistics from all sorts of organisations. I am grateful to bodies such as the Sport and Recreation Alliance, the Ramblers, the BMC and the John Muir Trust, and we have had excellent briefing from the House of Lords Library. Living Streets reminds us that going out and walking is not just a rural activity. I sometimes think on these occasions that you get so much material that you could write a book with it—you cannot possibly use it all.
The value of outdoor activities lies, first, in the economic benefits. The latest research that I have found—there is lots of it—is from the Welsh Economy Research Unit at Cardiff University on the new Wales coastal path. The research unit reckons that this attracted 3 million visitors and was worth £16 million to the Welsh economy over the 12 months from September 2011 to August 2012. In 2011, the LSE’s “gross cycling product” report—an economic report on British cycling—said that British cycling contributes £2.9 billion to the UK economy. I suppose that these studies all keep academics in work but they provide helpful background information.
The social benefits of the great outdoors are huge. The Government’s own UK National Ecosystem Assessment in 2011 estimated that the social benefits of people being able to access and enjoy the countryside amount to £484 million per year. How does one work out these figures? I have no idea. I am very cynical about their accuracy and what they actually mean, but if the Government think that that is what it is worth, I am very happy to support that because it helps me to encourage the Government to promote these activities.
Natural England, in its 2011 Monitor of Engagement with the Natural Environment report, said that 2.73 billion visits to the natural environment took place in 2011-12, 10% up on the previous year, and that £20 billion was spent. We are deluged with these statistics and they are important, but there are other statistics as well.
The John Muir Trust’s research with Glasgow University looked at equality in accessing the great outdoors and wild places, and at people’s experiences of outdoor activities. It reported that these are still heavily biased towards more prosperous people—I suppose middle England and the middle class, except that this research was carried out in Scotland. It found that people from the 15% more deprived areas in Scotland—worked out on our old friend the indices of multiple deprivation—were more than six times more likely to have had no experience of wild places.
I think of the great epic accounts that have been written by working-class Clydesiders, such as the fascinating book Always a Little Further by Alastair Borthwick about his experiences in the 1930s and going out into the Highlands with some of his mates, and the northern working-class climbers in the 1940s and 1950s, Joe Brown, Don Whillans and their friends in the Rock and Ice Club. They are legends but they were always a small minority of people from deprived backgrounds going out into the countryside, and that remains the case.
We now have stories about children in schools being asked, for example, where milk comes from and saying, “From the supermarket”. The importance of education and of extending involvement across the social classes is as great as it ever was.
On the health values, one academic study in 2007 reported that physical inactivity cost the NHS between £1 billion and £1.8 billion a year, and that the cost to the wider economy was £5.5 billion in sickness absence and £1 billion in premature deaths. We know that going out into the great outdoors not only has great physical benefits for people but great mental benefits as well.
Local authorities now have their new public health roles, and public health is nothing if it is not a matter of ill health prevention. The new role at local authority level will be absolutely vital, and yet these local authorities, the top-tier counties and the unitary authorities that ought to be promoting walking and other outdoor activities to boost public health to produce significant savings in public spending, are exactly the same authorities that are now undergoing drastic cuts in their budgets and cutting their public rights of way budgets for maintaining and developing their local footpath networks. We need more joined-up thinking, and those local authorities should be looking at how to do it.
This leads me on to the question of access, which is absolutely crucial. If you cannot get into the great outdoors it is of no use to you. The Ramblers research last year suggested that 70% of local authorities have cut their rights of way budgets in previous years and that 41% of them have cut them by more than 20%. Given another round of budget cuts this year, the position now is clearly much worse. I am proud to say that my local authority—I declare an interest as a member of Pendle Borough Council, which carries out rights of way work on behalf of the county council in Lancashire—has managed to maintain its service this year despite drastic and savage budget cuts. However, we shall have to look at whether we can continue to do so in the future. Our spending on the service is voluntary, not statutory, yet we have managed to maintain it so far, I am pleased to say.
We have many national trails through our area: the Pennine Way is not very far away, the Pennine bridleway comes within a mile or two of where I live, and the ward I represent on the local council has the Pennine Cycleway, Cycleway 68, threading through it. So we are in the heart of the national trails.
On blocked rights of way, the latest rights of way condition survey by the Countryside Agency in 2000 suggested that serious obstruction occurred every two kilometres on average. I suspect that statistic is much better now, although it will deteriorate because of the way in which rights of way staff in county councils are being removed.
I sponsored a Question for Short Debate about coastal access on 12 July last year, and said then that I was very pleased that, despite the doubts at the beginning of the coalition Government on this, it is now going ahead, but not as quickly as it was. I do not want to say anything more about it, although others do. However, there is a question about national trails generally. Natural England is moving responsibility to local trail partnerships and there is a concern that while local involvement in national trails is vital and can be beneficial—I speak as someone who was instrumental in securing a toucan crossing for the Pennine Cycleway across a busy dual carriageway in my ward—there is still a need for national oversight and a national champion. The Ramblers ran a petition in favour of having a national champion which attracted 18,000 signatures. It would be helpful if the Government could confirm whether there will continue to be national oversight of the national trails.
The rights of way network never has been and is not complete. The map was supposed to be finished by 2026, when a cap would be put on new registrations of historic routes. Stepping Forward, the report of the stakeholder working group on unrecorded rights of way for Natural England has not been taken up and pursued, and it would be interesting to know that the Government are now intending to do that.
One of the problems with access is the lack of knowledge and understanding of what you can do in the countryside. We have such an urban population nowadays that people actually do not know what they can do. They drive out in their cars, park in the car park or on the verge and get the picnic table out, but if you suggest to them that they could go for a walk, they are bewildered. That is why most people who go out into the countryside stay within sight of their cars. Education, information, signage, the maintenance of well used paths and clearing obstacles from less well used ones are all vital, but are being put at risk given the present difficulties with local government budgets.
The Government’s Forestry and Woodlands Policy Statement, published earlier this year following the excellent work of the Independent Panel on Forestry, did not pick up the recommendation of the panel with regard to access to forests and woodlands. While the specific recommendation may not be acceptable, it is vital that the question of access to woodlands generally is picked up again. There were concerns at the beginning of this coalition that there were forces, particularly within Defra, who were turning the tide on access. I think that that has now been sorted out and the Government are as committed to access as we could possibly expect; that is to be welcomed.
This is the centenary year of John Muir, who was a founding father of the modern conservation movement, an environmental campaigner, a pioneer of national parks, a champion of wild places and a promoter of the spirit of adventure. I suppose I should declare that I am a member of the John Muir Trust. It is appropriate to conclude these remarks with a famous quotation of his:
“Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul”.
That is what this Motion to Take Note is all about.
Lord Greaves
My Lords, I am more than grateful to everybody who has taken part in this debate, which has exceeded my wildest expectations. I am very grateful to the Minister for his comments, which I will read very carefully. I am also grateful to him for covering in detail many of the current initiatives which I did not have time to cover in my opening speech.
The noble Lord, Lord Haworth, reminded me of when members of the Mountaineering All-Party Parliamentary Group walked in a long crocodile up Blencathra, otherwise known as Saddleback, in the Lake District. He and I, as befits Members of your Lordships’ House, were proceeding at a stately pace at the back of the group. One of the people who thought they were looking after us stopped, waited for us to catch up and asked, “Are you two okay?”. We said, “Yes, of course, we are sweeping up to make sure nobody gets lost”. I pay tribute to that group, of which I am a member, which does a very good job.
My noble friend Lady Miller of Chilthorne Domer talked about playing outdoors when she was a young person. That reminded me that for the first 11 years of my life I lived on the edge of a very built-up, working-class area of Bradford—Bradford Moor—but across the main road was the huge great open air playground of Myra Shay, which had a stream going through it. We used to dam the stream there as well and fish for sticklebacks, minnows and others. I do not think that would be allowed nowadays as it would be considered far too dangerous. The important point here is that children nowadays are often provided with activities which give them a thrill but are totally and utterly safe. Many of the things that I did in my childhood, with semi-official approval, would never pass a risk assessment. However, we are all exposed to risk in our lives in all sorts of ways. Learning to cope with risk and to deal with it is very important. I do not think that we are quite getting the balance right at the moment with the whole compensation culture, health and safety and so on. I am sure that outdoor activities have a part to play here. People have to realise that many outdoor activities are dangerous by their very nature but there is nothing wrong with that. What is important is being able to cope with that danger. In many cases, modern equipment has been developed for use in caving or skydiving or whatever which was never available in the past.
I desperately tried not to blush when the noble Lord, Lord Judd, spoke about me. I thought that I would write down his comments and if I ever apply for a job again, which is not very likely given my age, I will appoint him as a reference. I was very grateful to him for his comments. I get off the train at Preston. The noble Lord, Lord Judd, cheers up at Preston when he looks out of the window. He can look east and, if it is a nice day, he will see the wonderful whaleback hill of Pendle. That is what really cheers him up when he gets to Preston.
A delightful and wonderful wheelchair bound lady lives in Colne. Her ambition in the next few months, together with her friends, is to get to the top of Pendle Hill despite her disabilities. My noble friend Lord Addington said that the great outdoors mean different things to different people. The great thing about this huge range of sporting and recreational activities is that they are not like cricket or football, they are activities where you set your own challenge and level. For one person taking a walk round the park is the same as undertaking an extreme rock climb or discovering a new cave is for somebody else. It is all to do with individual personality and that is why these activities are so wonderful.
I thought that the noble Lord, Lord Judd, was going to lead us in a rendition of “Hills of the North, Rejoice”, but perhaps that would have been inappropriate. The great Scottish rock group Runrig has what I think is a great song entitled “I’m Alive on a Lifeline”. Part of it reads:
The rockface inclines
Hold her, leave her
Rise to glory
Over mankind”.
All outdoor activities provide the people who take part in them with that kind of experience. That is why they are so wonderful and why the small amount of government money, local authority money and other public money which goes into them has such a huge leverage—I think that is the modern word—and why we should do our absolute best to maintain and protect it.