Children's Playing Space (Hansard, 23 March 1993)

§ Mr. Gyles Brandreth (City of Chester)

I beg to move, That leave be given to bring in a Bill to secure the provision of adequate playing space in new residential developments; and for connected purposes. I have an interest to declare, not just as a parent but as chairman of the National Playing Fields Association, which is the national trust of recreational space, a charity founded in the 1920s by a group of farsighted men and women who recognised the simple truth that every child deserves a place to play.

This is an issue that unites hon. Members on all sides of the House and always has. Three quarters of a century ago, the former Prime Minister and Member for Caernarvon Boroughs, David Lloyd George, declared: The right to play is a child's first claim on the community. Play is nature's training for life. No community can infringe that right without doing deep and enduring harm to the bodies and minds of its citizens. Informal play is not something trivial; it is not an optional extra. Play is fundamental. Play is essential for a child to develop physically, mentally, emotionally and socially. It is a means of learning to live, not just a way of passing time. That is why every child needs a place to play safely, to allow the body and the mind to develop to the full.

As a society, we cannot have it both ways: we cannot on the one hand deplore young people at worst turning to drugs or under-age drinking, hooliganism or vandalism, or at best sitting listlessly for hours in front of a flickering television screen and on the other deny those same young people the opportunities, the leadership, the space, to grow and develop in the way that we want them to.

Every child deserves a place to play. That is why my Bill will require planners, local authorities and developers to give proper priority in all new housing areas to the provision of adequate playing space. No one nowadays can build houses without making realistic provision for car parking, yet one can build a whole estate without having to provide anywhere for children to play. Do we really care more about our cars than about our kids?

Children need somewhere safe to play and somewhere near to home to play. All the research shows that children, particularly younger children, will not visit the local playground if it is too far from their own back door, and responsible parents are rightly concerned about letting their children stray too far from home. That is why my Bill calls for a tiered system of play provision to provide appropriate facilities for different play needs.

Small, secure sites of no more than 100 sq m—I have called them local areas for play, or LAPs; people who 788 enjoy acronyms will take that on board—would have to be provided on every new estate in sufficient numbers to ensure that the nearest LAP was not more than 100 m from any home. Larger sites, including play equipment—I call these local equipped areas for play, or LEAPs—would be required within 400 m of any home.

To those who ask, "It's a nice idea, but is it realistic?" I can reply that already one developer, Wimpey Homes, and a handful of local authorities have taken the concept on board and are adopting the proposals, without loss of housing space and at comparatively little cost.

The cost is indeed trivial when set in its proper context. Each year, we spend millions and millions of pounds on building superb new roads, but next to nothing on providing places for children to play. To say that this is a life-and-death issue is not to exaggerate. Every year, some 20,000 children are injured and some 300 children are killed on our roads, many of them because they are playing in streets that are not safe for them. This is a life-and-death issue; it is also a quality of life issue.

I fear that we are today robbing children of childhood. We live in a world where children spend three full working days every week watching television; where an increasing number of families do not sit down to eat together; where the proliferation of television sets in every household sometimes means that they do not even view together; where the crude, the ugly and the violent are paraded as commonplace; where popular papers print pages of material that a generation ago would have featured only in adult magazines. In my constituency this weekend, I visited an estate where there are six 14-year-old girls who are already mothers.

We must restore innocence to the young. We must give children back their childhood. We must recognise that every child, however tough the exterior, however sophisticated the veneer, deserves and needs a place to play in freedom and in safety. That is the issue that my Bill seeks to address.