Green Infrastructure - our natural life support system

Green Infrastructure is the network of natural environmental components and green and blue spaces that lies within and between the North West's cities, towns and villages which provides multiple social, economic and environmental benefits. In the same way that the transport infrastructure is made up of a network of roads, railways, airports etc. green infrastructure has its own physical components, including parks, rivers, street trees and moorland.

Just as growing communities need to improve and develop their grey infrastructure (ie. roads, sewers, energy distribution etc.), their green infrastructure needs to be upgraded and expanded in line with growth. Green infrastructure differs from conventional approaches to open space planning because it considers multiple functions and benefits in concert with land development, growth management and built infrastructure planning. Successful land conservation in the 21st century needs to be proactive, less reactive and better integrated with efforts to manage growth and development. Green infrastructure planning works at national, regional and local levels and is an integral component, essential for building well designed and sustainable communities across the North West.

• As a setting for economic growth and investment, improving regional image and a local sense of place
• Increased property and land values
• Attracts and retains people ensuring stable populations and labour supply
• A focus for social inclusion, education, training, health and well-being
• Landscape character and local distinctiveness, grounded in the principles of Landscape Character Assessment
• A framework for natural systems and functions that are ecologically fundamental to species and habitat viability, healthy soils, water and air
• Reverses habitat fragmentation and increases biodiversity to restore functioning ecosystems and provide the fabric for sustainable living
• Safeguard and enhance natural and historic assets
• Contact between people and nature
• Cohesive partnership working across disciplines and sectors

• There is an important opportunity to co-ordinate natural environment, biodiversity and liveability targets through the strategic planning and delivery of green infrastructure
• Increasing emphasis on cross-sectoral and partnership working within and between Government
• There is an outstanding environmental sector and voluntary resource base within the North West
• New revenue funding precedents have been set by the inauguration of the Land Restoration Trust, on which there is hope to build
• There is an opportunity to better co-ordinate environmental activity in the region to ensure that the isolation between thematic activities is overcome
• There is an emerging commitment from regional agencies to the concept of Regional Parks, although these need to be underpinned by a wider approach to green infrastructure planning

• Understanding of the spatial dimensions of the green infrastructure concept remains limited
• There is currently no structure to bind environmental work at the regional and city-regional levels
• There is a major policy gap between the South and the North West, which is further exacerbated by the gap in green infrastructure action planning, funding and delivery
• There is a need to find innovative ways of investing limited resources (both capital and revenue) throughout an extensive geographic area
• There is a need to overcome inconsistent policy within and between agencies
• There is a need to ensure that funding streams are effectively linked to policy drivers – not biased towards direct job and business floorspace creation
• There is a lack of Government championing of green infrastructure outside the key growth areas

• Green infrastructure should be the conduit by which existing area-based initiatives and pan-regional regeneration programmes are bound
• Providing the platform for delivering the Deputy Prime Minister’s vision for the Northern Way
• Integrating with the Countryside Agency’s Countryside In and Around Towns approach for functional spatial planning of the rural / urban fringe and urban areas
• Providing the backdrop to Housing Market Renewal and creating a quality environment to help prevent future housing market failure
• Creating a positive brand for our urban areas on which City Growth Strategies and other business-led improvement plans can be framed
• Integrating the physical environmental improvements of Strategic Investment Areas, land reclamation programmes such as Newlands; and
• Harnessing the potential of English Partnerships’ and North West Development Agency’s strategic development sites

• Partners will maximise synergy with other organisations and activities across the region to add value and ensure critical mass, particularly in respect of ensuring joined-up governance and delivery
• Fully integrated landscape character and landscape ecology assessments will provide the basis for strategic environmental policy and green infrastructure planning, to ensure complementarity with and enhancement of the existing biophysical resource
• Green infrastructure planning will be promoted as an integral part of the forward planning process in the same way as transport and communications infrastructure
• Partners will seek to use the provisions of the planning system to best effect, in order to provide a strategic context with material weighting in land use planning terms, and to secure planning gain to enhance local level greenspace delivery linked to new development
• The planning and implementation process will be fully inclusive, and will engage and involve local people and stakeholders to add value to projects and deliver wider benefits to local communities
• The Community Forests will liaise closely with local authorities to ensure that green infrastructure planning reinforces priorities and targets identified in PPG17 Audits
• Green infrastructure will be designed holistically and across administrative boundaries, with a hierarchy of provision reflecting location and context
• Partners will continue to commit to the ethos and principles of delivering multiple public benefits, and will utilise intelligence-led planning tools such as Public Benefit Recording System and the complementarity Additional Value Assessments
• Green infrastructure planning will include robust and objective business planning to ensure that greenspace is adequately resources in both capital and revenue terms
• Promotion of the concept of green infrastructure planning and disseminating delivery experiences with audiences across the UK and internationally