We’ll ALL pay the price if our parks waste away
Health Secretary’s rallying cry as he backs our campaign – and warns of threat to NHS unless green spaces are protected
THE decline of parks across Britain will pile more pressure on the NHS as it struggles to cope with an obesity crisis, the Health Secretary has warned.
Matt Hancock backed The Mail on Sunday’s Save Our Parks campaign, saying: ‘The health of the nation is at stake.’
His intervention comes as this newspaper’s crusade to protect our precious parks gathers momentum in Westminster, with the Government giving in to demands for 100 new parks to be created.
And in an exclusive article in today’s MoS, below, NHS chairman Sir Malcolm Grant also throws his weight behind our crusade to keep parks open and cared for. Sir Malcolm warns that ‘poorly maintained parks and green spaces do little to invite walking or play’ while the nation’s expanding waistlines ‘place a heavy burden on taxpayers’. Mr Hancock spoke out as he unveiled a blue plaque to honour Charles Wicksteed, the pioneer of playgrounds, at the Wicksteed factory he founded 100 years ago in Kettering, Northamptonshire. He said: ‘If we do not do what is needed to support the parks we have – and make sure there are new parks where there is new housing – then it will undermine the health of the nation and increase the burden on the NHS in the long term. I want to see a healthier nation – and we need to support our parks and playgrounds to achieve this. ‘The health of the nation is about getting people active. We have massive pressures on the NHS and to make sure it’s sustainable in the long term we need people to be healthier in the first place. ‘People have a personal responsibility to be healthier and live more active lives and it is vital there are parks and green spaces where they can do that. The health of the nation is about more than what is going on in hospitals. We all have a responsibility as a society to live more active and healthier lives.’ Thousands of parks are in decline or are being sold by cash-strapped councils. Hundreds of playgrounds have also closed. Our campaign was centre stage during a Westminster Hall debate in the House of Commons last week, with former Cabinet Minister John Hayes challenging the Government to build 100 parks.
He said: ‘Will the Housing Minister back The Mail on Sunday’s campaign to protect urban green spaces? Playing fields are places where people dance and play and meet friends and enjoy the open space. We need to protect them.’
Labour’s Shadow Housing Minister, Roberta Blackman-Woods, said: ‘We do not talk enough about how to not only save green spaces but to make green spaces.’
Housing Minister Kit Malthouse said he was developing the Government’s planning policy and ‘will take his [Mr Hayes’s] advice in doing so’. He said the Government aimed to build 200,000 homes in 23 garden towns by the middle of the century, adding: ‘I hope we might rise to his challenge of producing 100 new parks if each town had four.’