Contribution
My Lords, I am really privileged to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Fookes, who I admire greatly from afar—and she is absolutely spot on on this occasion as well. Several noble Lords have laid out the benefits and value of nature-rich green spaces close to where people live, so I will not go through those.
I want to focus particularly on Amendments 138B and 206 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Willis. I commend her erudite book on green spaces and health, which is an excellent evidence-based exposition of the whole case for green spaces and health—including mental health—improvement. In the interests of transparency, I particularly commend it since she sent me a free copy.
Apart from all the evidence the noble Baroness’s work provides on health and mental health benefits, I will also give an example from the work of the Woodland Trust, which I was privileged to chair until very recently, on what it is calling “tree equity”. The trust has mapped the prevalence of woods and trees and discovered, in line with other relationships between green open space and deprivation, that the poorest communities have the least wood and tree cover. That means that deprived populations are deprived in not only a socioeconomic but an environmental sense. The Woodland Trust is now engaging with local authorities, developers and others in those most tree-deprived areas to focus on the creation of green wooded spaces to enhance health, mental health and well-being and improve the environment for these deprived communities.
The model comes from an American example that covers the whole of the United States and was developed by the Woodland Trust’s equivalent in the States—good things do come out of the United States. Chicago, an early example of where this was promoted with some vengeance, showed unexpected benefits beyond mental health and well-being. There were reduced crime rates and enhanced community engagement, and the whole project of creating more green open spaces also created community leaders of the future, who learned their skills as community leaders in tree-planting schemes and community green space and then, strangely enough, went on to champion other community action on a whole range of issues. This is about community cohesion and the development of leadership, as well creating these very important green open spaces. I commend to noble Lords the Woodland Trust’s website on “tree equity”—although I hate the term as it is very clinical for something that is very important.
Although it is a bit better than it was, at the moment the creation of green spaces associated with developments depends wholly on the commitment of local authorities and developers. Some developers and local authorities are good at doing this and some are not. Guidance and the NPPF only encourage this, and as the noble Baroness, Lady Miller of Chilthorne Domer, pointed out, the NPPF is very vague in defining what standards are to be achieved, both on proximity to where people live and the quality of the green open spaces. I have seen development proposals where planting a few trees along avenues is the best they can muster.
As has already been pointed out, we need a much more fundamental approach. Master planning needs to be the space in which it happens, but encouragement and requirement needs to be built into spatial strategies, local plans and the responsibility of development corporations through statute, not simply by exhortation, as happens in the NPPF. The Minister will probably tell me—she told me this morning she was going to say this—that the NPPF is a requirement laid on local authorities and developers, but if you look at the terms of the NPPF, the reality is that it is an exhortation rather than anything that can be measured in performance.
I hope the Minister can tell us whether the Government are satisfied with developer and local authority performance on green space delivery, and, if they are not, whether she will seriously consider accepting these amendments so that a statutory requirement is included in the Bill.