The Landscape Institute (LI) has published its early thoughts on the proposals laid out in the wide-ranging paper, which the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC) published on 2 February 2022.
The government published its long-awaited Levelling Up White Paper on Wednesday 2 February, outlining its mission to ‘level up’ the country – tackling regional and local inequality and facilitating growth that delivers for all regions in the UK.
It’s a massive document that covers a dizzying breadth of policy areas, among them urban regeneration, green space, and communities. Underpinning this is a welcome understanding from the government that placemaking, green spaces, and the built environment will be instrumental to this agenda.
The direction of travel is encouraging. The Paper includes increased funding for parks, a drive to rejuvenate high streets, pledges to ‘re-green’ the green belt, and putting community capital at the heart of economic growth. The government has rightly set out a more holistic approach to economic regeneration, which includes the design and shape of the places in which growth happens.
But this is only the beginning. The whole strategy needs to better integrate natural capital, as well as recognition of landscape as critical infrastructure.
The money pledged for parks – £30m – is profoundly insufficient to plug the current resource gap. In our 2020 Greener Recovery paper, we called for £1 billion investment annually over five years to ensure that new and existing green spaces deliver the maximum possible benefits.
High-quality green infrastructure brings with it enormous benefits, from climate adaptation to improved health and wellbeing. Until everybody in the UK has equitable access to green infrastructure, the ambition of a fairer, levelled up country is a distant dream. Fundamentally, none of the White Paper’s ambitions are achievable without green skills and professional experts on the ground to deliver them.
Read the White Paper at www.gov.uk.
Comment: Sue Morgan, Landscape Institute Chief Executive
‘The levelling up agenda spans a huge range of policy areas: investment; regeneration; health; education; community engagement. Effectively delivering many aspects of it effectively will require a holistic vision.
‘Landscape professionals can implement this holistic vision, delivering nature-based solutions, giving local communities a voice, and designing spaces that people can be truly proud of.
‘We’ll continue to work with DLUHC and wider government to ensure the effective delivery of funding for green infrastructure, and landscape leadership underpins the regeneration of our left-behind towns and cities.
‘There remains a profound skill shortage in the landscape profession. Not only do we need to invest in the next generation by levelling up access to landscape education; we need to build capacity in local government to deliver the proposed change on the ground.
‘Devolved government is ultimately only as effective as available skills and funds allow. We will need to see far more from Westminster – more detail, more legislation, more funding – if this Levelling Up White Paper is to signify meaningful change.’
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