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.

Oral Answers to Questions

Wera Hobhouse Excerpts

Wednesday 11th January 2023 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

My right hon. Friend speaks with authority, and I thank him for his continued engagement on this critical issue. He knows the actions we have already taken with regard to Hong Kong, not least providing refuge for hundreds of thousands of people and being robust in standing up to what we believe to be Chinese aggression and the undermining of the settlement that we fought so hard to achieve. He has my absolute assurance that I will remain robustly engaged, and I look forward to sitting down with him to discuss this particular issue in more detail as soon as possible.

[Wera Hobhouse (Bath) (LD)]

Q8. Half of British women and a fifth of men have been sexually harassed at work or at their place of study. The Government’s own figures show that 41% of them say their perpetrator faced no consequences. Thanks to cross-party and Government support, my private Member’s Bill, which has now passed through Committee, will bring about a culture change to protect workers from harassment and sexual harassment, both from fellow employees and from third-party individuals. Will the Prime Minister join me in celebrating the cross-party work on this important change in the law and, by personally supporting its aims and objectives, will he ensure its continued safe passage through Parliament?

[The Prime Minister]

I thank the hon. Lady for her important work on this issue. Sexual harassment has absolutely no place in the workplace. Everyone should feel safe at work. Of course, we need to make sure that legislation does not have unintended consequences, but I know she is meeting my right hon. Friend the Minister for Women and Equalities to discuss the Bill further. I look forward to hearing about the progress in that meeting.

COP26: Devolved Administrations

Wera Hobhouse Excerpts

Thursday 16th September 2021 Commons Chamber

[Craig Williams]

The right hon. Lady and I share the campaign to get an SMR into our area of the world, and she is of course right. We on these Benches are looking to the UK Government to make these important decisions. Sizewell C hangs over all our heads across the House, as do the more practical applications of SMRs. There are important decisions to be made, but I suppose that underscores what I am trying to say about how this debate needs to focus on bringing these ideas together.

[Wera Hobhouse (Bath) (LD)]

Yesterday, I asked the Prime Minister whether he believed that burning fossil fuels would be a source of energy in the future and he replied that it would not. But he was only talking about coal. Today I have asked for a debate on this important issue. How do we go about stopping burning fossil fuels as a source of energy? Does the hon. Gentleman agree that we need an urgent debate in Parliament to discuss these vital issues?

[Craig Williams]

I was here when the hon. Member asked that question, and I heard the answer. It was a very good answer. I remember the Prime Minister emphasising coal, and that was not just words; it was clear action. I do not think anyone in the Chamber could doubt the reduction of coal in our energy network, and that has been due to clear action by this Government, putting their money where their mouth is. I would welcome a further debate on fossil fuels.

--- Later in debate ---

[Wera Hobhouse (Bath) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to listen to all sides in this debate, and it is important that we debate and bring out the differences, because clearly there are some. Time and again from this Government I hear the word transition. I understand that argument and the importance of bringing people with us, but we might be in this transition for too long. We have an end date, and we have now been waiting for such a long time that the urgency of the current situation will dictate our having to take rapid, urgent action, rather than transitioning for too long.

[Sally-Ann Hart]

Does the hon. Lady agree that when it comes to transitioning, we cannot rip the rug out from under people’s feet? We have to reskill people for future jobs so that they can have those jobs; otherwise, we will end up with people with no work.

[Wera Hobhouse]

I absolutely agree. We need to make sure that we have the right skills in place and that we create opportunities for each local community, area and region, so that people have jobs and we do not pull the rug out from under their feet. I totally agree on that, but we also need a Government who set a direction for where all this is going and make coherent plans for how we create new job opportunities. What is the direction we are going in? When will we set the final time limit for, for example, ending the national gas grid? Those Government actions are currently missing.

[Deidre Brock (Edinburgh North and Leith) (SNP)]

Does the hon. Lady agree that it is really rather disappointing that we are yet to see a net zero strategy document from this Government? We have been waiting for a significant amount of time for such a document to set the direction of travel for all Whitehall Departments and the Government themselves in respect of how they might achieve the UK net zero targets, and we are yet to see any sign of one.

[Wera Hobhouse]

Indeed. The Opposition are waiting urgently for exactly those things because we want to co-operate. We all understand how urgent this issue is and how only co-operation among all nations will get us on the right track. We should not be setting each other up and creating competition among us, with people saying, “We’re the best here” and “We’re the best there”. The whole globe has to come together to tackle this urgent issue that transcends nations. The Government often do not understand that, which is why we are here to urge them to change the pace of their action. The negotiations begin in only 46 days’ time and will determine the choices that we make about the future of our planet. They will determine whether we want to be ambitious enough to limit global temperature rises and avoid the worst impacts of the climate emergency, which will hit the poorest nations the hardest. The fact that it is the poorest nations that will be hit the hardest is not well enough understood.

At this pivotal moment in the fight against climate change, the Government cannot continue to treat the devolved Administrations as an afterthought. There are so many brilliant examples of where the devolved Administrations and local authorities have got it right on climate. Wales, as we have heard today, is second in Europe and third in the world for household recycling centres. It is also admirable that it introduced the Well-being of Future Generations Act 2015, which is a progressive and forward-looking piece of legislation. The rest of the UK should follow Wales’s lead, as it is a global leader, and legislate a future generations Bill. I am not lining myself up to become an honorary Member for Wales, but offering credit where credit is due.

The devolved nations’ knowledge and understanding of their local communities will be vital in providing solutions to the climate and ecological emergency. It is essential that they are included in a meaningful way in the lead-up to COP26. Local governments have been pushing for years now for a multi-level conference of the parties. As the COP26 president, the UK should be leading the way. I urge the Minister to push for stronger multi-level co-ordination, not just at COP26, but beyond.

There must be a deeper discussion on the localism of climate finance during the relevant negotiations, particularly on funds for loss and damage and adaptation. The devolved Administrations should have a seat at the negotiating table.

We Liberal Democrats have long believed in empowering local communities. Devolved Administrations must not be pushed to the fringes of these negotiations. Each one of our family of nations deserves to be heard at COP26, the most important climate talks since the Paris agreement. Inclusion in the official party delegation is the only way to ensure that all the voices in our nations are heard.

There is also a strong desire among local authorities to be much more ambitious than central Government. Many were quick off the mark in declaring a climate emergency. My own local authority of Bath and North East Somerset was one of the first to do so—a month before central Government. Just this week, our council has launched its first ever climate and biodiversity festival. It is showcasing the action taken locally to tackle the climate emergency, but, even more importantly, the festival is about starting the conversation with our residents ahead of COP26.

May I say one more thing, Madam Deputy Speaker? It is alarming how few people in this country know what COP26 is about. I think the statistic was that about 13% of people in this country actually know what it is about. What have the Government done to engage people in this important discussion about climate change?

[Nick Fletcher]

Will the hon. Lady give way on that point?

[Wera Hobhouse]

I will not, because we are running out of time.

The climate emergency is our shared responsibility. I am so grateful to those in our Bath community who have already got involved, and I urge all Members of Parliament to do something similar in their local areas in order engage local people in the discussions about the urgency of climate change and the very difficult decisions on which we need to agree.

The Government cannot deliver their climate programme without local authorities such as mine. Climate action begins at local level. The Government must empower local authorities at COP26 and beyond so that they can deliver on green transport, homes, energy, infrastructure and waste management policies that we need to implement if we are to get to net zero.

Again, it is a shame that our local government has been disempowered by central Government for decades now, and for the last decade in particular. We need to empower local authorities to do the things for local people, because only then will they have the real understanding of how to deliver to make sure that we have the jobs and the infrastructure in place. If central Government continue to disempower local government, we will not be in a good place. Most of all, the Government must recognise that the climate crisis is a real emergency, and that business as usual is not good enough. We need a change of pace from what we have seen so far from this Government and we need it urgently.