Contribution
The hon. Lady raises an excellent point. Making sure we are resilient to a rapidly changing climate with warmer, wetter winters and hotter, dryer summers is important for not just food and water security, but all infrastructure, including our roads and bridges. With the flooding in Tadcaster, we saw what happens when a bridge that connects two parts of a town is knocked out during a flood as well as the huge economic and social consequences that that brings. I will take the hon. Lady’s suggestion back to the Department as we look at business planning for this year.
In the Labour manifesto, we committed to deliver nine new national river walks, one in every region of England. That will open up our riversides to the public in a transformative way, creating new opportunities for recreation, supporting biodiversity and strengthening community access to nature. The walks represent a step forward in our mission to make nature accessible to everyone, improve public health and provide opportunities to engage in the great outdoors.
The new Coast to Coast Path national trail from St Bees to Robin Hood’s Bay—an area I know and love well—will take walkers across some of the most beautiful parts of the north of England, including through three national parks: the Lake District, the Yorkshire Dales and the North York Moors. It will be one to walk from west to east, so that hikers always have the rain on their back—and I can promise that there will be rain.
The new national trail will bring increased access opportunities for recreation and tourism, improving health and wellbeing and increasing spending locally. We already have fantastic rights-of-way networks across England, with 120,000 miles of footpaths, bridleways and byways. On Sunday, I got lost near Crawley and Gatwick airport while looking for a friend’s house on my bike. When we go down the little country roads and trails, the signposts are so important when the sat-nav is out of range.
Let me share a story with the House. As the Minister for the circular economy, I am always looking out for waste and pollution. I saw this big, white polystyrene thing by the side of the road and got off my bike, thinking, “That is absolutely disgraceful—someone’s chucked this huge piece of litter here”. It turned out to be a massive puffball mushroom family. I took it and put it in my bag. Last night, my husband and daughter enjoyed puffball mushroom steaks with a hot chilli sauce; we did a lot of checking to make sure it was not poisonous, but fortunately it is literally the size of a football so we could not really mistake it for anything else.
The hon. Member for Henley and Thame raised three points. On the issue of statutory purposes for national trails, the statutory purposes of protected landscapes have been established and evolved over 75 years. If we were going to make any changes, we would need lots of consultation and evidence gathering. Although trails and protected landscapes are part of the same family, they have different roles and responsibilities. Giving trails statutory purposes may not be the most effective way to support them to achieve their objectives.
A statutory purpose would not, on its own, bring planning protections. Many trails cross through existing protected landscapes and other designations. They are covered by protections for those designations already. As such, we do not at this time believe that additional planning protections for trails are needed to support trails in their mission. Perversely, without robust evidence they could place additional burdens on the teams that manage them, so we could not be certain they would provide the benefits that the hon. Member suggests.
We have, as he said, a constrained fiscal environment. This year, the trails have had additional funding with £3.26 million for access-for-all improvements. I saw when I visited Dartmoor how important that was in giving people with Tramper scooters, which I had not previously come across, access to the amazing landscapes there. I am afraid that the percentage quoted by the hon. Member is inaccurate, but we can give him the correct percentage if he wants it afterwards.
We had also funded National Trails UK. In ’25 to ’26, it received £108,000 in revenue and £150,000 of capital support from partnerships. DEFRA has also allocated £500,000 for national trail reinstatement this year to help reestablish the England coastal path when there was a break in continuity due to erosion.
There has also been movement in the last year on removing bureaucracy at the Environment Agency and I will take the good words from the hon. Member for Henley and Thame back to my colleague. I understand the Thames Path national trail partnership is continuing to work with the Environment Agency to reopen Marsh Lock bridge. The EA has conducted a survey and has options for repair and we will continue to work in partnerships on this issue.
Question put and agreed to.