Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:

To ask the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, what steps his Department is taking to increase access to green spaces for people who live in built-up areas.

The pandemic has highlighted the importance of green space for our communities, particularly for our physical and mental health. Between 2017 – 2019, Government has made £16.3 million available to support parks and green spaces including those in urban environments. This includes the Future Parks Accelerator, a joint National Lottery Heritage Fund and National Trust programme to support a cohort of 8 local authority areas to transform their parks estates, testing and learning from new and innovative models of parks management and funding to create more sustainable parks estates for the future. The learning from the programme will be shared widely across the parks sector to help local authorities to develop sustainable plans for their parks estates.

As we look to recover from the pandemic, my Department is working across Government, particularly with the Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs, on a cross Government approach to increase access to green space.