Becca Lovell on shaping green social prescribing policy

Dr Becca Lovell is a senior lecturer in biodiversity, health and policy, based at the European Centre for Environment and Human Health. She co-leads the Masters in Environment and Human Health and co-leads the Nature and Health Professional Development Programme. Her research focuses primarily on how the environment supports and promotes our health as well as translational work and evidence synthesis for policy partners. Becca and her team’s work has been involved in policy formation, evaluation, delivery, and service delivery evaluation. In this article, we explore her role in Green Social Prescribing, a policy that enables people with complex health needs to access green spaces and community activities.  

For a while now, there’s been a lot of interest in terms of how the environment influences health and wellbeing. Because of this, there is an infrastructural question of what types of environments exist, where they are located, and who has access to them. There is also the question of what we do with these spaces and how we support people to get outdoors. What initiatives and policies can we implement to encourage people to engage with the environment? Where does the funding come from, and what departments or organisations need to be involved?  

One of the policies we have helped research and develop is Green Social Prescribing. Essentially, this is where people with complex health needs get referred from primary care out into the community’s assets, such as green spaces, and are involved with community-led activities.  

In the mid-2010s, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs began to think about its environmental policy, and how people connect to nature was going to be a significant part of that. I won a fellowship at Defra to help with the transition, speaking with many stakeholders, including Natural England and the Environment Agency, as well as environmental NGOs, to assess what they already do and how some of their ideas could be better integrated into policy for greater impact. 

At the end of the fellowship, my colleague at Defra, Simon Maxwell, and I published a report and evidence synthesis at the same time they were putting together the new 25-year plan for the environment. Many of the recommendations that we wrote in this report manifested themselves as policy commitments in the plan. 

Out of the 25-year plan for the environment came a whole load of commitments around these areas, one of which was the Green Infrastructure Plan for England, to which we have contributed to its delivery. However, regarding Green Social Prescribing, we were then commissioned to ask the types of questions that would help further develop the policy, such as what the Green Social Prescribing landscape looked like. Who were the key players, and what was the state of delivery at that moment? 

With a couple of colleagues, I wrote a second report that went back to Defra, the Department of Health, and others. They considered our findings and successfully presented a new proposal to the Treasury.  This resulted in around £8 million from the Shared Outcomes Framework being put towards a significant test and learn programme, focusing on how to develop the ‘system’ of green social prescribing. Seven local authority areas received just under a million each to build their system and enable delivery. We were then asked to evaluate this programme, asking how you make Green Social Prescribing work effectively at scale. 

It was fascinating to be involved in formulating the policy, as well as in its delivery and evaluation. It was also hugely useful to see how policy from the national government is translated by local governments and others, and how it relates to them, their priorities, and their ways of working. 

I’d say my motivation now is that I really enjoy the immediacy of what I do and seeing how it manifests in policymaking. It is a privilege to be working in an area where there is this demand, policy interest and opportunity to use our evidence.