I dream of a Parks for All Fund that is even more generous than the Future High Streets equivalent – a fund that invests public money into parks with confidence that the health benefits and future National Health savings more than justify the expense.

This fund will need to cover capital costs for investment in park infrastructure, but crucially must also offer long-term committed revenue funding for maintenance and management. By focusing on impactful projects that address the grand challenges of our time – public health, the climate crisis, inequality – the fund could bring multiple local authority departments and wider parks stakeholders together, with a focus on delivering genuine and measured change.

Delivered in the spirit of adaptation and innovation, its projects could be used to pioneer our understanding of how to increase engagement with and use of parks, or how to maximise health benefits. By setting clear, locally-specific missions and establishing the full range of stakeholders needed to deliver on those missions, these projects would help us squeeze the maximum possible value from each and every park. This could include delivering new parks in areas of greenspace deficit, or addressing imbalance in the use of parks across different ethnicities through socially-engaged and bias-aware design processes.

Parks are a fundamental ‘public good’, when our parks thrive, people thrive. Of course, all of this says nothing of the environmental benefits of greenspace in terms of biodiversity, flood management and contribution to tackling the climate crisis. Rather than ‘nice-to-haves’ whose funding is pressured, discretionary or de-prioritised, a rounded and balanced understanding of the incredible and multi-faceted value that parks offer will see them recognised as net contributors to healthy, productive urban living, which are more than worthy of taxpayer funding.