Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Lord O'Donnell Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 9th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Crisp (CB)]

My Lords, I will add three completely new points from a health perspective, and one that may I think have been covered.

The first point is that we are going through a major transition in thinking about health and in the way to create health and prevent diseases. People may well be aware that the links between nature and health and activity have been known for years, going back to the Greeks—and one could quote them. The key difference today, which I think has not yet come out yet, is the quality of the evidence that we have about that impact. It is due to researchers, including my noble friend Lady Willis, that we now understand the physiological evidence about the impact—how being in nature actually affects the body, and the biological mechanism behind this. Importantly, as the noble Baroness has shown herself and as she quoted earlier, there is evidence that green space in urban areas is even more important than in rural areas. That is the first really significant point—that the quality of evidence is now there.

The second point is that the health system is starting to act on that quality of evidence. If I say that the evidence for this is now as good as for many medicines, based on the same sort of considerations and published in the same sort of journals, there is no reason why we should not be thinking, as many people are, about how we go beyond pills. I need just to state a very simple point —that last year alone 8 million people were prescribed anti-depressants. That is an astonishing number, and this is one area where one might well think that being in nature and the activities involved would have an impact.

The third area I want to point to is government policy. It is very clear, is it not, that the new NHS plan, with its transitions from hospital to community and treatment to prevention, describes that it needs to create the sort of healthy environments that this amendment and others in this group envisage. I should have said at the beginning that I have put my name to Amendment 206 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Willis, which I am particularly speaking to. There are some very strong health considerations here that are different from those that have been around before. There is policy, there is evidence and there is action actually starting to happen within our health systems. It seems to me that, if this Government have the ambition to leave the country in a better place than they found it—beyond simply numbers of housing units—then they need to catch this tide and make sure that there is implementation and that we are creating healthy homes and neighbourhoods.

I shall add one final point, which has already been mentioned, about the importance of allotments and of growing—the importance not just of being engaged with nature and physical activity but of being engaged in social networks and in the activity that surrounds that. These things come together to create healthy neighbourhoods and at the heart of it are the sorts of measures that have been set forward in all these amendments.

[Lord O’Donnell (CB)]

My Lords, I follow the noble Lord, my former colleague, as someone who has championed the idea that well-being should be the goal of government, and also as a former Permanent Secretary to the Treasury—I think I will take a slightly different slant on a number of these things. First, the evidence that green spaces make a big impact on well-being and mental health is huge, far beyond what has been said here. If one looks at the book by our own noble Lord, Lord Layard, one will find, on pages 237 to 239, a good analysis of this. There is a lot of economic evidence that looks at the difference between house prices where you have green spaces and where you do not, and looks at what we call hedonic price indices. The interesting part of that is that the price differences underestimate the impact of the green space on the well-being of the occupants—it is even bigger than those economic numbers would suggest, so I am a massive fan of taking account of the well- being effects in planning of what we do.

The Permanent Secretary to the Treasury says to me, “Yes, but let’s be very careful about unintended consequences here”. If we end up with lovely inner city green spaces with allotments and all the rest of it that no one can afford, all the poor will end up in the only places they can afford and they will end up with more commuting time, which is extremely bad for their well-being and their mental health—and then we will have problems. There is a solution to this, which I hope the Minister will take on board. The Treasury has a wonderful thing called the Green Book supplementary guidance on well-being, which can actually analyse all those things. I am prepared to bet that doing more on green spaces would give us a big net benefit. However, I do not know, and without that analysis of the unintended consequences on housing supply—where it is and the distributional impact—who knows? All I would stress is: please get the Treasury guys to do some work on this, using the latest estimates, because I think it will strongly back up your case.

[Baroness Sheehan (LD)]

My Lords, I start by apologising for not being able to take part at Second Reading; I just plead other parliamentary responsibilities. I find myself in a position where everything that needs to be said has already been said but not yet by everyone, so I will take that little proviso and carry on anyway. I strongly support Amendment 206 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Willis, to which I have added my name. I very strongly support all the other amendments in this group for the reasons that have already so eloquently been outlined by others in the Committee.

Amendment 206 is a little different, in that it would require every development corporation to prioritise green and blue spaces for all communities. We have heard about the benefits of green spaces but not so much about the benefits of blue spaces, although there are many. The difference blue spaces make to all communities has been highlighted by several noble Lords, with strong evidence to back up their claims. These spaces are parks, woodlands, riversides, lakes and ponds—they are not luxuries but essential infrastructure for biodiversity and climate resilience, with proven benefits for public health, air quality and, importantly, community cohesion, all leading to healthier, happier lives, especially for those on the poorest rungs of society.