Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what plans she has to increase public access to nature in England.

The Government recognises the importance of providing access to the outdoors for people’s health and wellbeing and are working to ensure this is safe and appropriate. We want to continue to work with landowners and user groups directly to ensure responsible access is granted in the right places to achieve our 25 Year Environment Plan commitment to make it easier for more people, from every background, to enjoy nature.

The Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000 provides the public a right of access to most areas of mountain, moor, heath, down, registered common land and coastal margin. The Government is delivering a number of policies to increase access to nature including:

• Working to complete the England Coast Path which, at around 2,700 miles, will be the longest waymarked and maintained coast walking route in the world. Over 2,000 miles have now been approved as England Coast Path, with nearly 800 miles already open. It will also create 250,000 hectares of new open access land within the coastal margin.

• Creating a new National Trail across the North of England.

• Carrying out the first review of Open Access Maps since they were created in 2004/05. The review will clarify where rights to access land exist and provide better clarity and consistency on access rights to both landowners and the wider public.

• In the England Trees Action Plan, we committed to the provision of safe and appropriate public access in as many woodlands as possible through a suite of measures from updating Forestry Commission guidance through to plans to encourage improvements to the quality and permanency of existing access. This will include how we might support greater access for all abilities. We will also encourage more access provision through our woodland creation grants. We recently amended the England Woodland Creation Offer to offer a higher incentive for the provision of access to new woodlands, and made more applicants eligible to apply for funding for access.

We are aware that we must balance the needs of all those who live and work in the countryside with those who visit to ensure that public access brings all the benefits we know it can without affecting nature recovery and food production or security.

Access to nature and the countryside is provided for under the Countryside Stewardship Higher and Mid-Tier schemes. Applicants can receive funds to install access capital items, create woodland access where it would benefit people, and provide educational access to school pupils and care farming clients. As we evolve the CS scheme going forward, we expect this to continue. The Farming in Protected Landscapes programme also funds the creation of opportunities for people to understand landscapes and cultural heritage, including permissive access. Customers of the English Woodland Creation Offer receive higher payments if woodland is near settlements and provide new long-term permissive access for recreation.

We are exploring how we can pay for actions covering permissive access, managing existing access pressures on land and water, and expanding education access offers. We are also exploring, geographically, where we can support actions to create access and engagement opportunities where they will have the most impact.