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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, in what her Department's Environmental Improvement Plan ensures people have equal access to nature.

As set out in the Environmental Improvement Plan we have committed to work across government to ensure that everyone lives within 15 minutes’ walk of a green or blue space. The Government is taking forward a number of polices to increase access to nature including:

• Delivering the £9m Levelling Up Parks Fund to improve green space in over 100 disadvantaged neighbourhoods in the UK.
• Delivering the £14.5m ‘Access for All’ programme, which consists of a package of targeted measures in our protected landscapes, national trails, forests and the wider countryside to make access to green and blue spaces more inclusive.
• The launch of the Green Infrastructure Framework: Principles and Standards for England in January 2023 which shows what good green infrastructure looks like and will help local authorities, developers and communities to improve provision in their area particularly where provision is poorest.
• Local Nature Recovery Strategies will help to identify locations where action for nature recovery would be particularly beneficial, encouraging the creation of more green spaces, including in urban areas.
• Investing more than £250m to support tree planting and regeneration in urban and peri-urban areas and particularly in areas with high levels of social deprivation. Last year, the Urban Tree Challenge Fund supported 46 projects in England that planted around 25,000 large trees, building upon the 113,000 trees already planted through this fund in deprived urban areas.