I remember well those scorching summer days of the 1970s and 80s, turned out of the house after breakfast with no expectation of being home before supper. We roamed for miles without a care in the world, wrapped up in the scent and sight of nature, miles of it. So hot was the summer in 1976, I can still see quite vividly the hedge in our back garden spontaneously combust from the burning heat of the sun.

I recently Googled the ‘village’ where we lived in the West Midlands before moving to Herefordshire, a remote bygone place like a black and white picture book. Zooming in on Google Earth, those fields across which we roamed for days and miles had disappeared, giving way to bricks, concrete and tarmac. Multiple villages merged to one big sprawl of grey, devoid of anything green. All of that wildness gone: flower-rich meadows, hedgerows and trees erased; homes to nightingales and clouds of insects lost. Nature now a word, not real anymore. The sense of loss was overwhelming. This is the reality for millions of people across the UK. Astonishingly, we’ve had children visit our education centres who have never walked on grass.

I am one of Thatcher’s children who lived through a period of political ideological transition. Thatcher's government marked a major shift in British politics to produce a ‘state’ that was smaller and did less, though in some ways more centralised, while the market was afforded a much more important role in the provision of services, and the promotion of entrepreneurship was seen as a major role for government.

In August 1980 Margaret Thatcher’s first government, although deeply unpopular and bogged down by problems, produced a Housing Act. Its bold intention stood out: “to give... the right to buy their homes... to tenants of local authorities”. It envisaged a revolution in housing policy, but it didn’t stop there. Thatcher sparked a revolution in housing and infrastructure development across the UK actively encouraged and funded by market-led politics. ‘Ecocide’ was legitimised, access to nature gone.

The current government's Levelling Up agenda feels like a resurgence of this attitude, and now also smacks of hypocrisy: this is the greenest-ever government, right?! By ignoring the environment, Levelling Up peddles blatant disregard for the well-being of our nation. Humanity needs nature, that’s a fact.

The truth is that for different reasons Labour has also had a track record of putting concrete ahead of nature and with her scientific mind Margaret Thatcher did in fact do more than any other world leader at the time to raise climate change as a concern at the highest level. During her brief green period in the late 1980s she shocked first the Royal Society then the UN with speeches ‘crackling’ with environmental passion. Her intervention consolidated the issue in the media and provoked many organisations into formulating policies on the environment.

“What we are now doing to the world, by degrading the land surfaces, by polluting the waters and by adding greenhouse gases to the air at an unprecedented rate - all this is new in the experience of the Earth. It is mankind and his activities that are changing the environment of our planet in damaging and dangerous ways."

She later recanted, voicing fears that climate had become a left-wing vehicle. Free market ideology won, the destruction of nature inevitable, access to nature for all gone.

We say enough is enough. The recent Levelling Up announcement has galvanised a movement of organisations to ask the Government to make equal access to nature, and the health and wellbeing benefits it provides, a core part of their Levelling Up plans.

The Wildlife Trusts, along with over 60 other organisations, are calling for a new legal duty in Levelling Up legislation for developers and public bodies to provide equal access to nature-rich spaces in new and existing communities. Backed up with resources for Local Authorities from the Levelling Up fund, this could create new parks, woods and watersides, making a huge difference for our people, public places and public health.

By protecting our existing access to nature, reviving run-down places, and creating new natural spaces within all future developments, we can put nature at the heart of every community.

BBOWT is working to connect more people with nature to help nature recover. Our Wilder Strategy has a vision of more nature everywhere – we want to see 30% of land on our patch properly managed for nature by 2030.

So if you want to guarantee nature-rich neighbourhoods across England, please join us in asking the Government for a legal right to local nature by signing the petition here.

You can be part of the solution to the nature and climate crisis by joining #teamWILDER and helping nature on your doorstep to recover. Find out more here.