Aerial view of River Dee in Chester at dusk including Queens Park Bridge and The Old Dee Bridge, Cheshire, England, UK. Credit: Getty Images.
In March 2026, we published the new Access to green and blue space in England Official Statistics in Development. These show that 80% of households in England have access to at least one green or blue space within a 15-minute walk.
I’m James and I work in the Environment Science and Analysis team in Defra.
In this blog post I’ll share more about the challenges of measuring access to green and blue space, our plans for the future, and how you can get involved.
Developing the statistics
In the Environmental Improvement Plan (2025), the Government, reiterated its commitment to “make sure that everyone has access to green or blue spaces within a 15-minute walk from home”.
To measure this, we needed to create a statistic that shows the current state of people’s access to nature to provide a baseline and track ongoing progress against the 15-minute commitment.
Green spaces typically include outdoor areas with vegetation. Examples include but are not limited to parks, playing fields, woodlands and nature reserves. Blue spaces include waterbodies such as large ponds, lakes, rivers, canals and the sea, where people can see and experience the blue space but not necessarily enter the water.
Leafy park. Credit: Getty Images.For this work, we had to define some key elements of green and blue spaces:
What is or isn’t a green or blue space Where can you access one How far from your front door would you have to walk to reach oneWe also had to consider how to make this information available in a usable format.
We have published the data at different levels of geography, down to Output Areas (the finest geographic representations in the census). Output Areas can be combined to broader spatial units such as Lower Layer Super Output Areas and Middle Layer Super Output Areas but also Local Authorities.
Using detailed datasets on roads, paths, households and nature spaces (see Figure 1), we used network analysis to calculate the walking distance between every home in England and its nearest green or blue space. There are approximately 26 million residential addresses in England, which means a lot of calculations and a lot of results!
Figure 1: A diagram showing the components of the network analysis. The distance between a household and its nearest green space access point is calculated along a network of walkable routes. In this case, the highlighted household (orange) is 15 m from the nearest access point.The results show that 80% of households in England have access to at least one green or blue space within a 15-minute walk. But this percentage varies depending on where you live in the country. For example, households in rural areas are more likely to have access than households in urban areas (91% and 78% respectively), but urban households are more likely than rural households to have access to smaller spaces within shorter walking distances (known as Local or Doorstep standard spaces).
We know that spending time in natural spaces is beneficial for our health and wellbeing however, how people use and experience these spaces varies greatly depending on many factors. In urban areas, there is good evidence that people use green spaces close to home, and evidence to support the longstanding principle that people should have access to a variety of green and blue spaces.
Further work is required to understand the health and wellbeing benefits relating to different geographical location, green space size, income and ethnicity.
Plans for the future
In Defra, we are always open to feedback on the official statistics that we publish. We have published this work as a statistic in development which means we want to hear from users of the data, experts and other stakeholders. We will use your feedback to shape future releases of these statistics.
To provide feedback please do one or both of the following:
Complete our feedback survey https://forms.office.com/e/cAV8z902Mi Email access.statistics.feedback@defra.gov.uk with the subject “Access to green and blue space in England”As part of the statistics, we have published a development plan. This is a list of the things we would like to work on and incorporate into the statistics. For example, we would like to improve our data on access points to green or blue spaces and public rights of way to make sure we’re not missing any. And we’re exploring publishing the data down to household level to support further analysis.
If there are things you feel are missing from our development plan or if you have any other comments or feedback, then please do get in touch.
seen at 09:32, 10 April in Environment.