Liveability / Green Spaces
Growth Areas team works with a range of partners across the region to promote the creation of new and enhanced green spaces and better links to the Countryside. Providing high quality parks and public spaces is crucial to building sustainable communities and ensuring that places are attractive for people to live in. Nationally, some £89m funding is helping to develop up 27 Liveability pilots Fund which will help local authorities improve parks and public spaces through significant service improvements. In the region, Three such pilots, Luton, Maldon and Ipswich, received some £9.5m to explore and implement innovative ways of improving and maintaining public spaces within urban areas.
In addition almost £7m is helping to support local partners in the region to improve on the quality and accessibility of green spaces in and around areas of rapid growth (Green Spaces Fund). This will build on the lessons learnt from existing schemes, such as Community Forests. Initiatives will be developed to ensure that housing growth is sensitive to the local landscape and creates an extensive green infrastructure that offers easy access to high quality natural areas.
Green Spaces work underway includes - Cambridge who received £1.5 million to support and enhance work underway at the Wicken Fen and Coton Countryside Reserve; The Forest of Marston Vale - £2.66 million to support three key projects; Green Gateway to Bedford, new community woodland at Houghton Conquest, new green space planned for Shortstown and Cotton End; Dunstable Downs new visitor facilities, habitat restoration - £1.5 million; Harlow - £1 million - to support the implementation of a green space strategy to enhance the intrinsic character and nature of the green spaces within Harlow and the wider countryside, to acquire new green spaces for public access and to create links between these green spaces.
Healthy Sustainable Communities
With the aid of growth areas funding, the team works closely with Department of Health colleagues and Strategic Health Authorities (SHA’s) to seek to ensure that we deliver healthy sustainable communities.
Much of this work concerns exploring likely implications of growth for health infrastructure and devising new models of care to ensure that adequate facilities are provided as required in an integrated manner. In addition to this, further work in underway in relation to health and the built environment, to explore healthy design issues and identify examples of good practice where public health can contribute to the spatial planning process. This work is also seeking to explore methods of improving the consideration of health within the planning system to ensure a more integrated approach to delivering healthy sustainable communities.
Housing Supply and Demand
Growth Areas Team is working to deliver the Government’s Public Service Agreement (PSA5) objective of achieving a better balance between housing availability and the demand for housing, including improving affordability, in all English regions while protecting valuable countryside around our towns, cities and in the green belt and the sustainability of towns and cities.
The team is working with all authorities to monitor existing and potential future supply, in order to identify any areas where the Government Office can have a positive influence on housing delivery. We are working with 14 authorities where delivery is below the planned rates in to help improve delivery and identify priorities for action planning. Action Plans setting out the priorities to improve the supply of housing have been agreed with all 14 authorities, links to each Action Plan is found below under Related Documents.
