Outdoor Activities

Lord Judd Excerpts

Thursday 16th May 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Judd]

My Lords, I declare an interest as a vice-president of the Campaign for National Parks and as a former president of the Friends of the Lake District, and currently a patron. If we are to have a second House worth having, people such as the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, are indispensable. I have the highest regard for his independent-mindedness and his consistent commitment to qualitative dimensions in our society, ensuring that we are not able, in all the preoccupations of economic efficiency and administration, to overlook what a real, healthy, decent and civilised society should be about. I am very grateful to him for having introduced this debate.

In preparing for the debate, I was interested by the quality and quantity of briefing that came to us from organisations working in the countryside and in activity there. I draw the attention of noble Lords to a particularly good brief that came from the Ramblers. In case there is any prejudice about the title of that organisation, the brief is anything but a ramble. It is concise, brief and very effective. Let me share some of it with the House.

“Walking is a major contributor to the UK economy. Research carried out in 2003 on behalf of the Ramblers revealed that walkers in the English countryside spend around £6.14 billion a year, generating income in excess of £2 billion and supporting up to 245,000 full-time jobs”.

That suggests that this is a brief worth bringing to the attention of most departments of government, not least the Treasury.

According to the Outdoor Industries Association, £9 billion a year is spent directly on outdoor leisure goods and services, including walking as well as other outdoor activities, such as climbing, and an additional £10.5 billion is spent in the local economy by people engaged in outdoor activities. The outdoor economy employs 2% of the UK workforce in rural areas and is worth 1.2% of the UK’s GDP.

It is worth noting that the foot and mouth disease outbreak in 2001 revealed starkly the extent to which our countryside is valued as a recreational amenity; the miserable closure of the countryside during the outbreak was estimated to have cost the rural economy and tourism industry £5 billion.

There is good evidence that clear, easy to use, well promoted path and trail networks influence more people to make day trips to an area or to stay for longer periods, thereby increasing visitor spend. This directly supports vital services such as shops and pubs, as well as local business such as hotels and small accommodation providers. For example, in 2010, £7.2 billion was spent visiting the countryside, while Hadrian’s Wall path has brought in £19 million to local communities since it was created in 2003. It is estimated that the south-west coast path national trail, running along 630 miles of the coast from Minehead in Somerset to Poole Harbour in Dorset is worth £307 million annually to the regional economy. Natural England estimates that the English adult population participated in an estimated 2.73 billion visits to the natural environment during 2011-12 and that just over half—52%—of visits to the natural environment were to the countryside.

Despite the popularity of countryside visits, our access infrastructure is not effectively or adequately supported. The extent and quality of public access opportunities is patchy; good-quality access exists in some areas, but in others the recreational infrastructure is fragmented, in poor condition or access is not signposted. The last national survey on the condition of public rights of way was undertaken in 2000 and revealed that on average users were likely to come across a serious obstruction every two kilometres.

In a timely way, the organisation Living Streets reminded us in its useful brief of a recent article in the Lancet. It revealed that increased levels of walking and cycling have the potential to save the National Health Service more than £17 billion over 20 years through reductions in the prevalence of type 2 diabetes, dementia, heart disease, cerebrovascular disease and cancer because of increased physical activity.

All this is powerful evidence of why we should take more seriously the economic dimensions of the countryside and what it means for Britain, but I do not make any apology for turning to another matter. I recognise that it is subjective, but I cannot believe that I am alone. It must be shared by many other noble Lords. I mean the priceless side of the value of the countryside.

What sort of Britain do we want our children and grandchildren to inherit? Is it one that has become so preoccupied with the mechanisms of creating wealth that there is nothing there of value to enjoy with the greater wealth at the disposal of the population? Do we want a Britain in which people are materially existing or a creative, living Britain in which youngsters—as an ambition, all youngsters—have the opportunity to discover themselves physically and spiritually and fulfil their lives by their experiences? For me, that is the value of the countryside and why all those who fought to make it available and enjoyable were so important.

I live in the Lake District, and when we are going home, my wife says that I become just about liveable with when we reach Preston on the train. I ask myself why that is so. I am sure many others share my experience that when I am on the west coast route from Oxenholme to Penrith between the two national parks and see the hills, the sun, the rain, the sheep battling with the environment and the rivers racing and flowing, there is an excitement and a dimension. I think, “My God, why are more people not able to enjoy this? Why have they not seen this potential in life?”. I know that when I have struggled, panted, climbed and clambered up a fell—although not at the moment, because my chassis plays me up a bit—and come over the brow of the fell, and there was a range of hills and mountaintops in front of me, it was an extraordinary experience. Why is it not more available to people of all ethnic groups in our society or to the handicapped? We should find ways to make it available, sympathetic ways that do not spoil the objective. There must be ways in which that can be done.

There is a small fell near my house. Until recently, I enjoyed going up it whenever I could. When you get to the top, on a clear day you can look one way and see in the distance the hills above Buttermere—the Gables—and Scafell. If you turn round, beyond the lake of Loweswater is the view of the Isle of Man and, on a very good day, looking across the Solway, you can see the Mull of Galloway and the Southern Uplands. I challenge anyone to have that experience and not say that life is about more than just making money and increasing one’s material well-being. That should be there for all.

The danger is not that we will see an all-out blitz on the countryside but that there will be a gradual erosion of what I am talking about. There will be what has been described as a suburbanisation of what I am talking about. The paradox, incidentally, with suburbanisation is that people like me who can afford to live in the countryside and enjoy it have to face the reality that local people are no longer able to afford to live there. There is the huge challenge of affordable housing, and how that is done sympathetically. I am vice-president of the Lakeland Housing Trust, which specialises in using existing buildings for accessible housing and is committed to the principle of ensuring that it is done in a sympathetic way.

A society like ours, with the psychological and other pressures that operate on people, needs places which are contrasts and provide peace in the context of living. In government departments and in opposition, we have to be rigorous in saying that, whatever the other immediate economic pressures and the rest—and you would be a fool to deny that these are of course important—we are here to protect this heritage and to enable it to be enjoyed by our people into the future. There must be a strong inter-departmental strategy to make sure that that is happening.

I conclude with an anecdote, which I have perhaps used more than once before in the House; I do not apologise for that, because it had a deep effect on me. Down on Windermere, there is a YMCA training centre. I was talking to a really rather impressive middle-aged lady who was utterly committed to the work going on there, and she said, “The other day, I had a youngster here from an inner-city area, aged about seven or eight. In the evening, I said to this youngster, ‘What did you do today?’. The youngster looked at me with wide eyes and excitement, and said, ‘Miss, I saw far!’. A few days later, I said to her, ‘What did you do today?’, and she replied, ‘Miss, I saw very far!’”.

That is what the countryside can mean. That is why it is invaluable. That is why those who want to ride roughshod over green-belt land because of some immediate economic opportunism when there are perfectly good brownfield sites available need to be challenged. They are destroying the soul of Britain.