Letter: Sun Tel bemoans building on gardens, ignores huge losses to car parking

The 20th December Sunday Telegraph carried a large front page story entitled 'Thousands of gardens 'stolen' by developers'

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/greenpolitics/6844167/Thousands-of-gardens-stolen-by-developers.html

and followed this up in an editorial which bemoaned the covering 'of areas that were once full of flowers and well-kept lawns with a rash of ugly buildings' and stating that 'Seldom can so much beauty have been destroyed, to so little point.'

There was no mention of the huge loss of garden space to car-parking , despite the negative consequences they highlighted being exactly the same. And one could argue that covering gardens to accomodate excessive numbers of cars is a rather more trivial reason than doing so to create more housing.

Consequently, I sent the following letter to the Sunday Telegraph on 31st December:

SIR - I was surprised to note that neither your article 'Gardens stolen by developers' (20th December) nor the letters on the subject (27th December) raised any concerns about the huge numbers and proportion of front gardens being smothered with paving so as to accomodate multiple car ownership. Nor do the supposedly 'garden-friendly' Conservatives. This is by far the greatest driver of garden loss in my neighbourhood. Walls and hedges are ripped out, and the grass verges driven over. Many gardens have been completely hard-surfaced, even where there is plenty of room to accomodate both cars and plants, and despite permeability legislation, there is still significant rainwater run-off. In my view this is lazy, unimaginative and contemptuous of the green and pleasant street scene which ought to be a prime attraction of suburbia.

Yours sincerely,
Chris Rose
Barnehurst,
Kent
(London Borough of Bexley)

Wet and weak Labour policy doesn't stop the run-off

Labour's policy of requiring planning permission before being able to lay more than 5 sq m of 'impermeable surface' - including for car-parking (see post of 29/7/2009) - was really all about trying to cut run-off in the wake of disastrous floods. But it has also been (wrongly) cited as protecting gardens.

So does it even have the primary intended effect? As far as I can see there are no definitions for, or tests of, permeability. In practice both paving, and the material it is laid on, are heavily compacted with vibrating plate machines. In other cases solid, non-permeable, 'impressed' material is used to give the impression of paving, and a metal grille is placed where this meets the pavement zone. But that seems to me to be against the spirit of the law.

Here are some pictures of run-off (and drainage failure) from pretty flat sites, after just a short period of quite light rain.

Is this amount of paving really necessary ?