Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Lord Krebs Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 27th October 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, I support Amendment 88 and congratulate noble Lords on all the excellent speeches we have heard so far in support of it. The provision of green space is terribly important when building homes. I am in despair to see so many developments of little houses packed tightly together with little or no garden space and no small green spaces in the public areas.

I urge the Minister to dig out the excellent 2020 report, commissioned by her department, Living With Beauty; Promoting Health, Well-being and Sustainable Growth, which inter alia made the point that communities were more likely to approve of new housing if it was of a beautiful design and harmonious with the local architecture. It was written by the urban design expert Nicholas Boys Smith, the founder and chairman of Create Streets. He was also chair of the advisory board of the Government’s Office for Place and is an academician of the Academy of Urbanism.

Chapter 10 is called “Neighbourhoods: create places not just houses” and says:

“the research is remarkably consistent. Most of us prefer places we can walk in, where there is greenery frequently present and where we find the streets and squares beautiful to look at and be in. We prefer places that do not cost the earth but can help us live in harmony with it”.

I urge the Minister to read and implement the report, especially Chapter 11, which is called “Nature: re-green our towns and cities”. I make no apologies for quoting the first few paragraphs of this chapter since it makes the point better and more succinctly than I can. It says:

“Sustainability and beauty are not in conflict. Rather they are in symbiosis. This is true at all three scales of building, place, and settlement and has been evident on our visits. It is also reflected in polling and well-being data. Much of the evidence we received … stressed this point.


‘There is a considerable body of evidence that shows green spaces in rural and urban areas are highly beneficial to health and well-being and also provide space for people to meet. The perception of beauty is an important factor for realising these benefits’.


Put simply, green is good for us, as Natural England argued in their evidence to us. The presence of greenery in the urban environment normally has a positive impact on our mental and our physical health. Street trees seem particularly important. They are associated with cleaner air, slower cars, fewer accidents. They provide shade in hot summers. And, perhaps astonishingly given the complexity of human life, street trees have a measurable effect on human health even taking into account income, age and education.


At all three scales, we therefore believe that it is necessary to ‘re-green’ our lives. It is important not to be naïve, however. Many essentially very poor development proposals attempt to cover up their shortcomings with some token tree planting. A strip of grass or a couple of trees cannot rescue a polluted, ugly and profoundly inhumane place”.


I agree entirely with those words. If we cannot rescue those places that are currently built, at least we should stop building new ones in the future. The London National Park City briefed me a few years ago that its research suggested that people would not walk more than about 250 metres to a park or a green space. Therefore, I say to the Minister, the answer is in these amendments—build the green space into the gardens in the streets and little parks or accessible green space in all housing developments. If people will not go to the parks and green spaces, bring the parks and green spaces to them.

[Lord Krebs (CB)]

My Lords, in speaking in support of Amendment 88 in the name of my noble friend Lady Willis of Summertown, I reiterate in particular the point she made in her introduction to the amendment that if, as we have heard on many occasions, the Government’s view is that this amendment is unnecessary because the matter is covered by the NPPF, please could they show us the workings? Can they demonstrate to us with firm data that the NPPF is indeed working to protect green space in our towns, cities and villages? If we do not have the data, how can we believe what the Government tell us?

We then tend to fall back on anecdotes. We have heard a number of anecdotes already this afternoon, and I will add my own. One of my penances in life is that I support Oxford United. I live in Oxford and, as one of my friends said, when you support Oxford United, you support them through thin and thin. Near the Kassam Stadium—which is in a more deprived part of Oxford, the Blackbird Leys estate—there used to be a very nice little green park. It was small, but it was a bit of greenery where children could run around and kick a ball. Just in the last year or so, that green space has been completely covered wall-to-wall with houses—they are packed in and there is no green space left. Anecdotes like that make us anxious. We do not see where green and blue space is being protected.

I hope that the Minister will respond to my noble friend Lady Willis’s request and, probably not at this moment but in writing, send us all the data that shows that the NPPF is delivering what the Government claim it delivers.

[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.