Official statistics announcement
Access to green space in England
Access to green space in England, calculated using a range of definitions.
- From:
- Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs
- Published
- 16 January 2024
- Last updated
- 22 April 2024
- Release date:
- 1 August 2024 9:30am (confirmed)
The release date has been changed
- Previous date:
- 12 March 2024 9:30am
- Reason for change:
- The Access to Green Space in England is an Official Statistic in Development to measure people’s access to green infrastructure. The work is aligned to the definitions of green space previously employed in Natural England’s Accessible Natural Greenspace Standards (ANGSt) and similarly uses the data published on the Green Infrastructure map portal as its main source. It extends the previous work through the use of network analysis to calculate travel time/ distance rather than straight-line distances, the provision of scenarios using an expanded set of green space categories, and the enhanced use of data on the rights-of-way network. These improvements are in part to allow access to green space in rural areas to be better represented. This publication is being delayed to address quality concerns that have arisen from extending the scope of this work to meet additional customer needs. This relates to three main issues. • Improving the coverage of green space by including categories on woodlands and National Nature Reserves. These classes are not represented in existing ANGSt standards but provide important infrastructure especially in rural settings. To include them in the analysis requires work to derive new data on locations where features in those classes can be accessed by the public, which are not currently available in the Green Infrastructure dataset. • Increasing the coverage of access locations for open access land. Open access land, e.g. commons, provides a significant resource for access particularly in rural areas. Data is available on where such places can be accessed in the Green Infrastructure dataset. However, this information is incomplete, and many locations do not have access points determined. This interferes with the application of network analysis methods that we are using to more accurately determine travel times. • Improving the quality of rights-of-way paths. Rights-of-way data available through the Green Infrastructure dataset has been compiled from a large number of local authorities each employing different methods for data capture and management. Whilst the data is incredibly useful, particularly for cartographic purposes, there are significant issues when using it to understand connections amongst geographic features or calculate routes to green spaces, due to inconsistency in its topological coherence. These considerations are important to the network analysis methods we are applying to determine access particularly in rural areas where the road network is more sparse and so rights-of-way more critical to movement.
These statistics will be released on 1 August 2024 9:30am