You don’t need a PhD to know that a kid with a decent playground is a kid with somewhere to go. Now a University of Exeter study has put numbers on it. Researchers looked at 4,219 children aged four to 11 in the Children of the 90s study and found that those taken to a park at least once a week scored, on average, 16.5 per cent better on mental health assessments than those who went less often. The Medical Research Council and the National Institute for Health and Care Research paid for the study. The researchers controlled for socioeconomic status and family adversity. Lead researcher Mark Ferguson of the University of Exeter said:
“Our research suggests encouraging children to visit parks and playgrounds at least once a week could be a practical way to support their emotional wellbeing, social skills and mental health. But for this to work fairly, communities need good-quality parks that are safe, accessible and welcoming to families from all backgrounds.
“Parks give children space to be physically active, which is known to support mental and physical health, as well as helping adventurous and imaginative play to build confidence and independence. We believe parks could be more than places to play, but an important resource for children’s healthy development.”
Ferguson is right. But the press release stops at the edge of the playground. The class that runs Britain has spent a generation shutting the gates.
Are there enough parks and public spaces for children? Not for millions. About 2.3 million children under nine in Britain live more than a 10-minute walk from their nearest playground. Across Great Britain, 6.1 million people don’t have a green space within a 10-minute walk. Local authority managers rated only 40 per cent of parks in “good condition” in 2021, down from 60 per cent in 2013. Children in Scotland have access to nearly five times more public playgrounds than children in London. The most deprived communities are more than twice as likely to live in areas with low natural space. In England, one in eight children has no access to a private or shared garden; in London it’s one in five.
Who did this? Ministers cut council budgets by half when David Cameron was prime minister, and every government since has refused to restore them. Councils closed about 800 playgrounds across the UK in the decade up to 2025, with another estimate putting closures at over 400 between 2012 and 2022. Local authority spending on open spaces in England fell by 10.5 per cent between 2010/11 and 2012/13. By 2023, park budgets across England had fallen by more than £350 million since 2011, and spending on play facilities dropped by 44 per cent in just a few years. Developers pack new estates onto less green space: housing built between 2009 and 2021 has up to 40 per cent less green space than older neighbourhoods, and a 2022 investigation found parks near new homes were 40 per cent smaller than they should be. Urban green space in England declined from 63 per cent to 56 per cent between 2001 and 2016. Children’s outdoor play has fallen by 50 per cent in a generation — only 27 per cent of children now play in the streets regularly, compared with 80 per cent of adults when they were children in the 1970s.
This isn’t a policy glitch. Parks are a use-value, not a profit centre. Landlords and developers don’t make a penny from a kid on a swing. So when the crisis hit, the ruling class dumped the cost onto working people. Parks are a “non-statutory” service—councils can slash them without breaking the law. That’s not an accident. It’s class war from above. The social wage—the bits of life working people win collectively, from schools to libraries to green spaces—gets squeezed whenever capital needs to restore its profits. And the squeeze lands hardest on the poorest children, the ones the study says could benefit most.
Britain is an imperialist power. Its ruling class has long extracted superprofits abroad and used some of that to buy social peace at home. When the postwar settlement broke, they made the working class pay. They cut the social wage and told us to be grateful for a pilot scheme. Ministers have announced £54 million for outdoor spaces through several schemes — Playgrounds Fund £18 million, “Access for All” £16 million, Plan for Neighbourhoods £20 million. Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole council is also putting £4.6 million into around 120 play areas. Fine. Compare that £63 million with the £350 million cut from park budgets in England alone. A few million is a sticking plaster on a severed limb.
The researchers say parks could help reduce inequalities in children’s development, but only if good-quality options are available, safe, welcoming and easy for all families to use. Millions of children don’t have that. That’s not a gap in the evidence. It’s a gap in class power. The bourgeoisie won’t hand back the playgrounds it closed. Working-class people will have to organise and take them back.
