Public Access to Nature

Wera Hobhouse Excerpts

Thursday 18th May 2023 Commons Chamber

[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.

[Wera Hobhouse (Bath) (LD)]

I congratulate the hon. Lady on securing this important debate, of which I am a co-sponsor. Does she agree that, along with access to nature, we need restoration of nature? Local authorities can lead the way, but they need the money, and it is so important that our urban communities in particular can benefit from local authorities restoring nature where they can.

[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.

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[Mr Robin Walker (Worcester) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas), and I congratulate her on securing this very important debate. I want to focus most of my remarks on the importance of access to nature for children and for education. The hon. Lady and I have worked together on campaigns on these issues. However, I also want to touch on some local matters relating to developments in Worcestershire and Herefordshire to do with how we ensure that the children in all our schools benefit from the fantastic countryside and the fantastic nature around us, and how we protect those special places.

Last Saturday, I was on a sponsored walk for my local hospice up in the beautiful Malvern hills. It is a historical place for conservation, and the work of the Malvern Hills Conservators to protect the landscape of the area goes back over a century. We can see three counties from up there, including that of my hon. Friend the Member for Gloucester (Richard Graham). We cannot quite see Gloucester, but we can certainly see Gloucestershire, as well as Herefordshire and Worcestershire. It is an incredibly valuable landscape, and it was great to see, as we went on with our miles of walking, that scouts and guides were up on the hills and enjoying them as well. I pay tribute to all the voluntary organisations that provide access to nature for children of school age, including of course the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award scheme, and the very important work that they do in getting kids out into the natural environment.

It was very interesting during my time as schools Minister to visit schools in the inner cities of London and Birmingham that were doing really important work, recognising the benefits of nature for the mental health of pupils, in trying to connect their pupils with nature. I remember one visit to a school in a very built-up area of Lambeth, where the teachers had determined to use the resources they had available to develop a garden, create a natural environment and have a pond in the small urban space they had, so that children could engage with nature. They talked about the mental health benefits of that. When we face such a huge mental health challenge in our schools and in our education system, I think we should see access to nature and engagement with nature as one of the solutions. It is certainly not the case that only schools in the countryside can deliver that—schools in urban environments can deliver that, too—but it needs to be something that we consider as part of our curriculum.

[Wera Hobhouse]

The hon. Member makes a great case for young people needing to have access to nature, but because there is so little directly accessible in their local area, they often have to travel a very long way. Does it not make sense to open up more nature, so that people do not have to travel, but have it on their doorstep?

[Mr Walker]

I absolutely recognise that, which is why it is important that councils work together with voluntary groups to make sure that we signpost those green spaces. In my own consistency, which is an urban constituency— Worcester is surrounded by beautiful countryside, I accept —we have seen a fantastic local project by the Worcester Environmental Group and the council to develop the Wild about Worcester Way, a walking route around the city. It connects green spaces in the city and accessible areas such as the Worcester Woods country park, Nunnery wood and Perry wood, where Cromwell allegedly met the devil, to our primary schools, so that there are walking routes for children to enjoy. In areas where they might not enjoy great parks and facilities, to link schools, through active travel, to such places is important.

We also need to look at routes through the countryside. I do not represent many farmers and I am not going to get into the detail of the debate about the right to roam, but I do think we should be exploring more greenways—more long-distance travel routes from area to area. I am interested in proposals for a Hereford to Worcester greenway to enable both active travel and engagement with nature for people. For that to work, there needs to be join-up between different Departments—the Department for Transport, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities—to make sure we have an approach that can support these things with proper funding.

I touched on this earlier, but there is also the importance of having nature as part of the curriculum. I have spoken before about the amazing work being done by the Rivers multi-academy trust in my constituency, which is promoting a curriculum based on the sustainable development goals. Right at the heart of that curriculum is engaging children with nature and making sure that they understand their responsibilities to nature. I was interested in what the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion said about the balance of rights and responsibilities when it comes to access. It is absolutely key that children have the opportunity to learn those responsibilities at an early stage in their education, and they are not going to do that unless we connect them with nature and give them those opportunities to be outside and to be engaged with nature.

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[Rachael Maskell (York Central) (Lab/Co-op)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) on securing this important debate and the Backbench Business Committee on granting it. Research in 14 different European countries has shown that the UK’s record is woeful, with biodiversity, wellbeing and natural connection the worst among those countries. Among the G7, we come bottom and across our world we are in the lowest 10% of countries. So today’s debate should kickstart the Government’s thoughts, as well as drive forward the Opposition’s ambitions to establish a plan for nature. I welcome that the Government this year published the environmental improvement plan, but its 10 goals lack ambition and teeth, and the rigour we need to ensure that the commitments in that project are delivered in a timely way.

[Wera Hobhouse]

In the south-west, only 5% of land is accessible to the public. A lot of green-belt land is privately owned and therefore not accessible to them. Does the hon. Lady agree that part of the plan should be to open up green-belt land to the right to roam?

[Rachael Maskell]

I absolutely agree. The historic injustice in who owns our land across our country has to be addressed. We have much work to do on that. The environmental improvement plan does not address those issues, which must be addressed, so that everybody can have access to our natural environment.

The plan also lacks ambition when it comes to addressing inequality. The word “inequality” is not sewn through the plan and it must be. Inequality is why we are standing here today, whether that involves the historic injustice of who owns the land in Britain, or the diversity of our communities, where access is far more restricted for those from the most deprived communities—something I recognise within my constituency. Just 8% of England is covered by the right to roam, and 3% of our rivers and 15% of our woods.

We are indebted to Chris Smith, and the work he did in bringing in the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000 to open up access to mountains, moors, heaths, downlands and common land. However, even after those efforts, most of our country locks us out. We need a fresh start and I believe my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds North West (Alex Sobel) will have that ambition when a Labour Government come in. Even in York, with our incredible bioeconomy, pathways are still closed to the public as developers buy up land and lock them out. We need to address that injustice too.

I personally have known the enrichment that access to nature gives. It is my place to go for restoration. It is a privilege to walk many national trails, over hills and mountains, to be lost in complete wilderness when finding myself, and to cycle the breadth of the country. Even in my constituency, each day, I seek to have a brisk walk to enjoy the rivers and strays, and the environment that comes into the heart of York. I always say that the most important skills I ever learnt were to ride a bike and use a map and compass, yet many of our young people today have no access to either. It is so important that young people learn those vital skills as part of their formal education process. Many youth organisations such as the Brownies, Guides, Scouts and Cubs teach those skills, but every child should have that enrichment.

I will never forget talking to a teacher at Carr Junior School in Acomb in my constituency, who talked about how the children in her school had never seen crashing waves at the seaside and never felt the “sand between their toes”. We have incredible assets across our country, but our children cannot necessarily access them unless their schools have proper funding to afford those trips, or unless we have a strategy that really focuses on young people getting that love of nature.