M
Member
Speaking in the House of Lords on 9 September 2025
Debate
Planning and Infrastructure BillContribution
What has been happening as a result? The evidence on the impact of that loss is clear. The Environment Agency published The State of the Environment: The Urban Environment in 2023. It used land cover mapping to look at urban green space between 2001 and 2018, and it saw a decline from 63% of urban green space in cities across the country to 55%. You might say, well, over 17 years an 8% loss is not much—but let us put that in hectares. Some 120,000 hectares of urban green space have been lost, even though we have had the NPPF in place. Much of that would have been local patches of land used for recreation or community allotments—for people to be able to walk their dogs or to grow food and to gain the significant physical and mental health benefits that we now know are associated with being around green and blue spaces. Since 2021 the situation has got worse, not better. Other published evidence indicates that the loss of urban green space in some redevelopment areas in cities over the past few years is up by 34%. The idea that the NPPF is fine and is protecting green space is not there in the evidence base in front of us.
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