Dear Constituent,
Thank you for contacting me about access to nature and the right to roam.
The following Written Answer explains the Government’s intention ‘to ensure that everyone lives within a 15-minute walk of a blue or green space’:
‘We announced in our Environmental Improvement Plan in January our intention to work across government to ensure that everyone lives within a 15-minute walk of a blue or green space and committed to work in parallel to reduce barriers to access.
We are currently focused on developing the right modelling tools and indicators to allow us to accurately measure the baseline, identify where to target efforts and to track future progress, engaging closely with stakeholders as we do so. As part of this we will consider the role of Rights on Way in helping to deliver this commitment.
The Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000 provides for a right to roam across open access land, giving the public a right of access to most areas of mountain, moor, heath, down, registered common land and coastal margin. This means that public already has the ‘right to roam’ over many areas of wild, open countryside. We have no plans to change this.
England also has a fantastic network of footpaths with over 120,000 miles of public rights of way as well as many permissive access routes, including over 200,000 hectares of Forestry Commission freehold land.
We are also working to complete the King Charles III England Coast Path (KCIIIECP) which will create 250,000 hectares of new open access land within the coastal margin. At around 2,700 miles, KCIIIECP will be the longest waymarked and maintained coast walking route in the world and over 850 miles of the path are now open to the public.’ (Countryside: Access, WQ 192060; Trudy Harrison MP, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Defra; 20 July 2023)
Thank you again and I hope that this is helpful.
Yours sincerely,
Mel Stride MP
MP for Central Devon
