#115: Unequal access to the countryside

My local news magazine programme featured this report last week, which was also in the Guardian newspaper in a piece written by Patrick Barkham (who will feature a number of times on this blog)

It reports on work by The Ramblers to explore the variations in access to the countryside.

It seems that there is substantial variation in access to the countryside which varies in areas with greater ethnicity or lower income levels.

The path network adds over 3,000 healthy years of life to the nation, worth an estimated £2 billion – more than £33 for every person in England and Wales. That’s the cost of 8.5 million ambulance call outs or 10 million outpatient procedures.

But our access to paths is not equal. There is significant imbalance between the number of paths available to the most and least deprived communities. And the health and wellbeing impact of this inequality is stark.

Our path network has the potential to help transform Britain’s declining health and wellbeing, but right now the benefits are primarily being felt by the old, the wealthy, the healthy and the white.

Residents of the wealthiest areas in England and Wales have 80% more paths in their local area than the residents of the most deprived areas.

The most white-dominated areas have 144% more local paths than the most ethnically diverse.

Where health is the worst, the number of paths is the lowest.

Doubling the average length of paths in a neighbourhood would result in an additional annual 78.5 million walks in nature across England and Wales. And help harness the potential of our path network to transform Britain’s health.

This is also a reminder that all the resources that are going to be used to teach the GCSE Natural History also need to reflect the diversity of the UK: its landscape, communities, people and cultures.