I am constantly being contacted by residents across the Richmond Park and North Kingston constituency asking for help in their fight against inappropriate development of green spaces in their area.
‘Garden Grabbing’ is growing at an alarming rate. But it’s not just gardens. Playing fields are under siege too. Although reliable figures are hard to come by, it is estimated that in 2002, UK school playing fields were being sold off at a rate of nearly one a week.
The main reason is our rush to build new houses. Local authorities have been given strict house-building targets by the government, and as a result, local communities are increasingly powerless to prevent their communities being ripped up and developed. Campaigners believe we are losing up to 30,000 gardens a year, the equivalent of twice the area of Hyde Park.
The main problem is that the Government has defined gardens as “brownfield sites’. That means that instead of being protected as havens for wildlife, not to mention the sheer pleasure they bring communities, they currently have the status of neglected industrial wasteland.
We need to change that nationally, and I will continue do all I can to ensure Gardens are reclassified by the Government as ‘greenfield sites’, as the national Conservative Party is already committed to doing.
But the Government could do more than that to protect our precious green spaces. The US tax system, for instance, is heavily biased against developing greenfield sites, and in favour building on genuine brownfield sites. We should do the same here.
The UK is a small nation, but unlike most other countries, we have allowed a disproportionate amount of activity to become centralised in and around London. The effect is that pressure for housing in the South East is immense, while other parts of the country are experiencing the emergence of ghost towns. If we built reliable and effective High Speed Rail links between our cities, as the Conservative Party has proposed, there would be a greater incentive for people and businesses to begin repopulating parts other than the South East.
That, combined with increasing use of the internet, video-conferencing, and telecommunications would make it much easier to run businesses and create employment around the country.
In neighbourhood after neighbourhood, the issue of protecting our green spaces is rising to the top of the agenda. Nationally, the most effective action we can all take is to ask our local MPs if they support re-classifying gardens as Greenfield Sites.
Zac Goldsmith