Our Ask of Government
More than 90 organisations have united together from a wide range of sectors and interest groups—experts in nature, public health, access and equality — to ask the Government to take important steps to level up access to nature.
In order for everyone to get the health and well-being benefits of accessing nature-rich local spaces, we need Government to:
- agree to an amendment to the Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill that will require local planning authorities to prioritise addressing health inequalities, with improving access to nature as an essential part of local plan.
- help to fund improvements in access to nature by extending the Levelling Up Fund to green infrastructure projects.
These steps would increase and provide more equitable access to high quality nature for everyone through local planning authorities including policies to ensure equitable access to nature, targeted to the communities who are the most nature-deprived.
This could look like new developments being required to provide new accessible high quality green and blue spaces for residents and provide the impetus for existing green and blue spaces to be improved for nature and people. These improvements could include improving access to nature-rich spaces (such as putting in a footpath leading to woodland), daylighting rivers in city centres to allow public access to the banks, and measures to improve the biodiversity and quality of parks (such as wildflower meadow planting and actions to work towards achieving Green Flag status).
It would also help tackle major public health issues such as obesity, and benefit both our economy and NHS. Funding of £5.5 billion over 3 years to level up access to nature-rich urban spaces would deliver £200 billion in NHS savings, 40,000 jobs and greenspaces for 3,500 deprived communities.
For more details of our proposals for Government please read our policy briefing and to support our asks please sign our petition.
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