The latest policy initiatives in the green space sector were debated at the leaders programme by panellists Len Croney, a consultant and past president of the Institute of Leisure & Amenity Management, Lucy Heath, senior specialist in people and access at Natural England, and Nicole Collomb, head of public space management and best practice at CABE Space.

Diploma will boost the image of horticulture

Around 100 schools and colleges in England have applied to offer a new diploma in environmental and land-based studies for 14- to 19-year-old students. The diploma, announced last year and led by sector skills council Lantra, will form the first tranche of new qualifications to be introduced over the next three years in what is billed as the most significant development in the country's education system since the introduction of GCSEs.

Collomb told the audience in Leeds: "This is a massive opportunity to get young people interested in local authority green spaces, and parks organisations have a potential role to encourage them into the sector."

Green infrastructure is critical

A Landscape Institute "position statement" launched for consultation at the end of last year stressed the importance of green infrastructure in development. The document aims to highlight the benefits of green features and calls for soft landscape to be given as much emphasis as traditional grey aspects such as roads and drainage.

The statement insists that beefing up green elements will tie in with policies on climate change, social cohesion, health and well-being and economic competitiveness.

Heath said: "We have been trying to promote green tests for new development, not just within growth areas but in any key regeneration."

UK play areas to receive £225m

The green space sector should be in line to receive some of the "unprecedented sums" now being invested in children's play, Nicole Collomb said.

A government pledge just over a year ago to spend millions to rebuild playgrounds in the UK will pay for renewing 3,500 play areas and creating 30 staffed adventure playgrounds for eight- to 13-year-old children in disadvantaged areas.

Collomb said targeting the money at the green space sector "would tie in with moves to make play areas more natural and to integrate landscape features because children need to interact with nature".

The policy aims to make this country the best place in the world for children and young people to grow up. But there are fears that the pledge will take three years to implement.

Why aren't we selling the age-defying properties of parks and fresh air?

Leisure management consultant Ken McAnespie gave a high-profile talk last year saying anything classed as "age-defying" was the clincher to almost any sale. Yet green spaces and fresh air were better than any chemical product. The cost of physical inactivity is calculated by the government at £8.2bn a year. The potential value of an urban park in terms of avoided inactivity is estimated at £1.6m to £8.7m. A park in Portsmouth could potentially save the economy £4.4m a year and a 3km footpath on the edge of Norwich £1m. Heath asked the audience: "How are you using the whole health agenda to promote your parks?"

CABE Space addresses skills crisis

A new skills strategy just published by CABE Space, with national partners including GreenSpace, Lantra, the Landscape Institute and Groundwork, has highlighted the urgent need to tackle the decline in green space skills.

Collomb told the audience: "We have an ageing workforce and need young people. This is the time to create green-sector jobs: there's a lot of people out of work in banking and marketing with good management skills that the sector could use. We need to look at how we can lure them in and then keep them.

"One problem is that there are no longer good career paths. Once, you could work up from apprentice to manager, and we need investment in structures and staff skills."

Biodiversity: still on the agenda

Education leaders who recently took legal advice on the Natural Environment & Rural Communities Act found the act applied to all public institutions. A "biodiversity duty" imposes an obligation to "have regard to the purpose of conserving biodiversity" such as wildlife habitats.

Heath said: "This raises the profile of biodiversity across England. Local authorities should ensure their sites show the best biodiversity. This links into the issue of a planning standard for a natural green space within 300m of your home for day-to-day natural experiences. It's a challenging standard to reach and we can do it by improving biodiversity."

Local ownership of green spaces

The government released the Communities in control White Paper last year, which proposed to shift power to local citizens. It suggested that citizens could manage services like street markets, community centres and parks, while a new "asset transfer unit" would support community groups' efforts.

The government is piloting 14 community land trusts that own and control services for public benefit such as parks, play areas and natural spaces.

Croney explained: "Ministers want more people to be involved in their local services, with profits going back to the communities.

"This is very different from the past and we don't know how successful, or sustainable, it will be."

GREEN SPACE 'PART OF THE SOLUTION'

The green sector is part of the solution to "broken" Britain, Ipsos MORI head Ben Page (pictured) said. But Page, a CABE commissioner, warned they must not undersell themselves.

The Ipsos MORI Public Affairs managing director and chair of the group's social research unit said of the past decade: "There's a dawning realisation that probably we have lived through a strange bubble. House prices will take six years to return to 2007 values, and public finances 20 years."

What was thought as "normal" had in fact turned out to be "the odd decade", with concern about unemployment at a historical low of 27 per cent against 40 to 80 per cent in other decades. Broken Britain, he said, was a country "ill at ease with itself", feeding a rise in nostalgia, anxiousness and retrospection.

Hovis, he said, was rerunning the same adverts it used in 1974, as people looked for comfort in the past. The knock-on effect of the loss in confidence in years to come would be an almost inevitable squeeze on public finances and restructuring of services in local authorities.

"If you are being squeezed into cultural services or consumed into ever-larger directorates, are you clear about the drivers of behaviour and which of the 198 national indicators the authority may be signed up to? And can you influence them? Because if not, you might miss out as budgets become extremely tight.

"When it comes to people's well-being they can give money to police with truncheons or give it to you to do things in parks. Working with partners, we need to tell people what we are doing. If two public services are delivering the same services to the same people, the one that explains what it does will be better regarded."

Tyne and Wear, he said, launched a highly successful billboard poster campaign highlighting what the council did, not from the politicians' or bureaucrats' viewpoint but from the grass-roots staff doing the work.

A challenging strapline - "We'd love to know what you think - phone us" - swung emphasis on to the authority's proactive desire to communicate. This proved more effective than reactive signs instructing people to "ring this number if the park is vandalised".

Parks and open spaces in Southwark, meanwhile, were enjoying the highest level of satisfaction ever because the south London borough had focused on the things that mattered to local people, such as safety.

"We need to be very careful about the wide range of national indicators on quality of life, and we need to be articulate," he said, quoting the acclaimed author and management consultant Tom Peters: "If you can't explain your position in eight words or less, you don't have a position."

Page said: "You're part of the solution to broken Britain and you have to make that clear. We shouldn't undersell ourselves and we need to make sure our staff believe it. Because if they don't believe it, why should anybody else?"