The past few weeks have made us all painfully aware of the value of good health. We have been given a glimpse of the world our not so distant ancestors knew. One where illness is an arbitrary threat and if we wind up in the sickroom there is a worrying chance death may be gibbering in the corner.
We have also been shown that health is one of the fault lines exposing the inequalities in our society. The poorer you are the more likely you are to fall ill and if you do the less likely you are to have a positive outcome.
The poor have always missed out on those things that make living a life that is comfortable and healthy possible, like having access to green spaces.
Research carried out by the European Centre for the Environment and Human Health at Exeter University in 2014 found that people living in green urban areas showed fewer signs of anxiety and depression. In 2016 a briefing document prepared for the Houses of Parliament office of science and technology showed that physical and mental health is influenced by access to green spaces.
The more green spaces there are near to where they live the more active people are and the better they feel about themselves. Improving access to green spaces was made one of the aims of government plans to use social prescribing to help people with mental and physical health issues.
This still matters now we are living in the world of social distancing; in fact, it is more important than ever. Anyone who has spent the past eight weeks trying not to climb the walls of their home will attest that being able to go out into even the smallest of gardens has been a lifesaver.
What of the prospects then of the 12% of British households identified by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) as having no access to a private or even shared garden?
In London that jumps to 21% and the same will be true of other major cities where property prices are high and the gap between right and poor is wide. A fact attested to by ONS data showing that 20% of households where members are in ‘low skilled’ work have no gardens, compared to 7% of those in admin work. BME households also have less access to green space with 37% having no garden.
During the pandemic we have learnt, rightly, think differently about so called ‘low skilled’ workers, many of whom have been in the front line working for the NHS or helping to keep food on the shelves. Is it right that their home, the place where we all expect to be safest should put their health at risk?
The great public health campaigns of the nineteenth century had improving where people lived as much as how they lived and what happened when they fell sick at their heart. As did the Labour government that created the NHS in 1948, sickness was one of the ‘five giants’ Bevan pledged to slay, by building decent housing as well as hospitals.
In the 1980’s and since such thinking has been dismissed as so much idealistic utopianism. All very good in theory, but quite impractical in a world where the market calls the tune and we must all dance along as best we might.
Now we know differently, through the hard route of bitter experience rather than through reason winning the argument with expediency. Disadvantaged communities where social distancing is harder than it is in the suburbs have been hit hardest by covid-19 with poor living conditions creating health inequalities that have led to more deaths.
We need to build back differently as well as stronger, the NHS needs to be properly funded, with a large slice going towards paying all its staff a living wage. There also has to be a recognition that health doesn’t begin and end at the door of the hospital or doctor’s surgery.
It begins at people’s front doors, which should be attached to good quality homes they can afford to live in. Ideally these doors would open onto individual gardens, on a small island that isn’t always practical, but every home should be within walking distance of a public park that is safe and pleasant to use.
There has been a lot of talk in recent weeks about ‘key workers’ being heroes; it is time then to give them the homes they deserve.
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