The Climate Emergency is REAL! Stop the destruction of front gardens!

Front gardens play a variety of roles. They can be a place to play, to relax or park a car. They also affect how houses and streets look, provide homes for local wildlife and soak up rainwater.

Unfortunately, in Brent, a considerable number of homeowners have paved over their front gardens and continue to do so to make space for cars and this causes problems with drainage as well as loss of nature.

Having a guaranteed place to park (driveway) probably means that such homeowners use their cars for short journeys, which can be walked or conducted by public transport. Such journeys aggravate congestion on our roads and add to the already chronic levels of pollution experienced across the borough.

As part of its commitments to a Climate Emergency, the council should be encouraging homeowners to think differently about their front gardens and if they need to park a car on it think about how to do that in a way which doesn’t make local flooding worse and which can also be good for nature.

Everyone can play a part in tackling Climate Change. Front gardens can help to limit Climate Change by retaining trees and plants which help soak up carbon. They also help us be more resilient to dealing with hotter and wetter weather.

Many of the drains in Brent were built a long time ago and were not designed to cope with the increased rainfall that climate change brings. It is helpful to avoid as much water as possible from entering the drains and gardens play a role in that because they soak water up.

Many residents don’t realise that paving one or two gardens would make a difference but as the trend continues there is an overall combined pressure being placed on our infrastructure and this can lead to more incidences of localised flooding.

But paving over front gardens is also about being resilient to climate change and helping the natural environment. Trees and plants not only absorb carbon, but they also lower the surrounding temperature because it catches the suns rays whereas asphalt raises the surrounding temperature because the sun’s rays bounce off it. This is called the ‘urban heat island effect’ and the more green space that we have in our urban areas the more resilient we will be to higher temperatures.

Somethings that the council could do to prevent the loss of front gardens to hard landscaping are as follows:

1)  Limit / reduce the number of allowable parking permits per household, currently three. Less permits = less pressure to convert front gardens into driveways.

2)  Increase the charges for a ‘dropped kerb’ and introduce an annual charge for this. Currently, it is a one-off charge and not prohibitively costly;

3)   Impose an annual fee where sections of the highway have become out of bounds to other residents because  of the  single yellow lines that have to be painted either side of a dropped kerb to facilitate the easy access of the homeowner to his / her driveway;

4)  Retrospectively fine homeowners who have failed to adhere to the council’s 50% greenery policy; and

5)   Encourage homeowners that need to make space for cars in front of their homes to think of greener design solutions, where attractive planting and parking can be combined. Hold competitions for such.