Politics Home Article | Building Britain for children: why protecting playing fields matters

Somewhere along the way, we stopped designing Britain for childhood.

Not deliberately. No government ever announced that children should spend less time outdoors. No planner set out to reduce independence. No parent wanted their son or daughter to swap a bike ride for another hour in front of a screen. Yet, somehow, that is where we have arrived.

The latest report from the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health puts data to something many of us have sensed for years. Child health has stagnated or worsened across many of the measures that matter, from obesity to mental health to physical activity, and health inequalities are widening.

Their verdict was blunt: Britain’s record should be a “national embarrassment”. It is hard to argue otherwise.

When I was growing up on Merseyside, my parents rarely knew exactly where I was. Like millions of children of my generation, I’d disappear on my bike after breakfast and return when it was time for tea. We walked to school, climbed trees, built dens, kicked footballs around until it got dark and explored the world under our own steam. None of it felt like exercise. It was simply childhood.

Looking back, I realise those ordinary freedoms quietly built my health, my confidence and my independence. We weren’t active because someone organised it but because the world around us made activity the natural choice. Today’s children are growing up in a very different Britain.

Roads carry far more traffic; parents have understandable concerns about safety, and green spaces have slowly disappeared from many communities. Leisure increasingly happens indoors and for too many children, especially those growing up in more deprived neighbourhoods, movement has become something organised rather than something that simply happens. We didn’t choose to make children less active – but we built a society that has made it harder for them to be active.

Health doesn’t begin in hospitals; it begins years before anyone becomes a patient. It begins in the streets that children walk along, the parks they play in, the routes they cycle, the neighbourhoods they grow up in and the freedom they are given to explore them.

We spend endless time debating how to fix the NHS and far too little protecting the environments that stop people needing it in the first place.

That is why the Government’s decision to retain statutory protections for playing fields deserves recognition.

On the surface, it is a planning decision. But it’s much more than that: it is a statement about what kind of country we want to be.

Playing fields are not simply pieces of undeveloped land; they are places where children discover movement without thinking about exercise, where local sports clubs create belonging, where friendships begin and where confidence grows.

One in three children now leaves primary school overweight or obese. Behind every one of those statistics is a child whose future could have been different.

Protecting playing fields alone will not solve Britain’s child health crisis and neither will another strategy, awareness campaign or report. But it points us in the right direction. In an age when loneliness is rising and childhood is becoming increasingly indoor-based, playing fields are doing far more than hosting sport. They are quietly producing healthier and more connected children and people, which has a profound social and economic impact: active lifestyles save health and care services around £8 billion annually and prevent 3.3 million cases of chronic illness a year too.

The greatest gift we can give is a childhood where walking to school, riding a bike, climbing a tree or kicking a ball around with friends becomes unremarkable again. So if we are serious about creating the healthiest generation in decades, we need to start asking a different question. Not, “How do we persuade children to exercise more?” But, “How do we make movement an ordinary part of childhood again?”

Those are very different challenges. The first relies on changing individual behaviour, the second asks us to change the places we build and the choices we make. History suggests the second will always be more successful.