Parks (Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough)

Rishi Sunak Excerpts

Monday 9th July 2018 Commons Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government (Rishi Sunak)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough (Gill Furniss) on securing this debate and on her passion for her constituency and its parks. That passion shone through her speech. I am grateful to her for highlighting some important issues and sharing her experiences of the huge benefits that local green spaces bring to lives of so many.

I recognise the ambition of local councils, working together with their communities and Government, to preserve good-quality parks and green spaces now and for future generations. The Government are committed to ensuring that our parks and open spaces continue to provide vibrant and inclusive places for local communities to enjoy. Local parks are great at connecting communities and encouraging interaction between younger and older generations and between people from different backgrounds. I recognise that to achieve that shared goal we need to support local councils to deliver it, so it may be helpful if I set out what the Government are doing to support the hon. Lady’s local area and, more broadly, if I touch on some of the activity the Government are undertaking to safeguard parks and open spaces.

On overall funding for local government, this Government believe strongly that local people who know and understand their community are best placed to decide how funding should be spent in their area. That is why funding provided through the local government finance settlement is largely not ring-fenced, as it allows local authorities, which are independent of central Government, to manage their budgets in line with local priorities. In practice, that means there is no specific funding stream for parks, just as there is not for waste services or children’s services, for example. Local communities are best placed to decide on their own local priorities.

I pay tribute to the many local authorities that have done a fantastic job over the past few years to continue delivering high-quality services, from improving adult social care to maintaining our roads, public spaces and parks in what has been, for some, a difficult financial climate. The most recent local government finance settlement, announced earlier this year, provided a £1.3 billion increase in resources to local government over the next two years, taking the total to £45.6 billion in the forthcoming financial year. Of this, Sheffield will be able to access more than £1.2 billion between 2017 and 2020 to spend on all its important local services, including its parks. I am pleased to say that this year Sheffield will see a real-terms increase in the core spending power available to its council.

In addition to funding from the settlement, the current business rates retention scheme is also yielding strong results, and it is warmly welcomed by local authorities across the country. Sheffield itself estimates that, in this financial year, it will keep just shy of £5 million in business rates growth. All in all, there are significant financial resources that Sheffield can decide how to spend among its various priorities.

There are many local authorities across the length and breadth of our country that are doing great things at local level and exploring new and innovative approaches to attracting funding and reinventing park management. I recently had the pleasure of addressing the Local Government Association’s “Action on Parks” conference, and I was hugely impressed by the great examples of local authorities working collaboratively with local communities, health bodies and academics to explore new approaches to joining up services to realise the benefits for parks.

The truth is that there is no single answer to achieving good-quality green spaces. An example of the excellent work that local authorities are doing to help raise the quality of parks is participation in the green flag award scheme, which recognises a high standard of parks and green spaces. The scheme is owned by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government and operated under licence by Keep Britain Tidy. A record 1,500 green flags were awarded last year, illustrating the scheme’s success. We are seeing ambitious local councils striving to achieve green flag status for more of their local parks, and I am pleased to say that Sheffield is among the leaders, with 13 local green flag award-winning parks.

Furthermore, Sheffield is embracing opportunities for attracting new funding. Since 1996 the council has received £13.7 million of Heritage Lottery Fund grant investment for its various parks, which includes fantastic support for the botanical gardens and Weston Park.

In 2014 the innovative “Rethinking Parks” programme, delivered by the Heritage Lottery Fund and the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts, awarded £100,000 to support two new projects in Sheffield to develop new ways to fund and manage parks. Since 2010, Sport England has invested just shy of £1 million in 30 grassroots sports projects across the city, including a £65,000 award to Wisewood Juniors football club to improve its football pitches.

However, no one size fits all. For example, Newcastle is a pioneer in exploring an innovative charitable trust model for its parks in conjunction with the National Trust, and Sheffield has also looked at that in the past. That model has the potential to make it easier to raise outside funding from social investment and businesses; to ring-fence budgets; to focus on a single objective of the parks in question; and to mobilise volunteers.

I am pleased that the Government have already taken steps to support improvements to our local parks and green spaces. We heard about the Communities and Local Government Committee’s excellent report—I agree with the hon. Lady that it was fantastic. In response, the Government created the parks action group, which is a testament to the importance we place on government at all levels coming together with the sector to identify the right solutions to the various issues she has presented this evening. I would like to give my personal thanks to the membership of the parks action group, who have worked tirelessly to explore some of these issues. Its membership is a veritable “Who’s Who” of the sector, and includes excellent organisations such as Fields in Trust, Natural England, Groundwork, Keep Britain Tidy, the National Federation of Parks and Green Spaces, the Association for Public Service Excellence and many others. The group has begun to develop some key programmes of work, which will be supported by half a million pounds that the Government have committed to support its work.

That activity will support the delivery on six priority workstreams, which touch on some of the topics that the hon. Lady raised: exploring the funding landscape and proposing solutions; setting parks and green space standards; sharing a vision for parks and green spaces; empowering local communities; increasing knowledge and building skills, and increasing usage by all. I look forward to sharing more details on the work that the group will undertake to better secure the future of parks. I will provide an update to the Select Committee later this year, but I expect to be able to set out the programme of work in more detail in the coming months.

I wish to address the question from the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) about the planning framework. I am pleased to tell him that the national planning policy framework offers protection to all recreational facilities, including parks. The framework is clear that recreational land should not be built on unless an assessment has been carried out and has shown clearly that a park is surplus to requirements or that the loss resulting from the proposed development would be replaced by equivalent or better provision in terms of quantity and quality in a suitable location.

Lastly, I wish to deal with the point the hon. Member for Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough raised about access to parks in a deprived area. She makes an important point, and one that I am keen to ensure becomes a reality as the parks action group carries on its work. She will be pleased to know that there was a previous programme called the “pocket parks” programme, whereby the Department funded £1 million-worth of small parks and almost 90 were created up and down the country. Ensuring access in deprived areas is a high priority for allocating that funding. I will be pleased to start looking through the results of that work to ensure that the money found its way to the right places, so we can use that work in formulating future plans in the parks action group.

Again, I thank the hon. Lady for securing this important debate and for ensuring that the value of parks is recognised. I pay tribute to local councils up and down the country for the hard work and dedication they put into parks. As we have heard, parks are often at the heart of our communities and are the space where families and local communities come together. I believe we have a shared vision of providing good-quality open spaces for our local communities, and I firmly believe that by working together we can build a better future for our green spaces.

Question put and agreed to.