Driveways are suburbia’s last line of defence

It’s not hard to see how green anguish at people paving their front gardens will become the next frontline in the war on cars

I‘If it allows us to drive at all, the Government wants us all to buy electric cars, but how are we supposed to charge them if we are not able to park up against our homes?’

t is easy to sympathise with Joni Mitchell’s words: they paved paradise and put up a parking lot. But if you live in a city and need a car, the chances are you may feel less sentimental about the scraggy lawn in front of your house – and see it rather as a potential haven which gains you freedom from predatory traffic wardens.

But for how much longer will homeowners be allowed to pave over their gardens to create parking spaces? Water minister Rebecca Pow didn’t quite announce a ban on front garden parking in an interview in the Daily Telegraph yesterday, but she did suggest that developers could be forced to limit paved driveways as a price for being allowed to connect to local sewerage networks.

Pow is quite right that paving over grass and earth areas with impervious tarmac and concrete should be discouraged: when you turn a piece of absorbent garden into a hard-paved area, you create the kind of run-off which, street multiplied by street, ends up causing the kind of flash flooding seen in London last summer. While lazily blamed on climate change, the floods may have something to do with what the National Flood Forum calculates as the loss of 22 Hyde Parks-worth of absorbent gardens in recent decades.

But this problem can be dealt with by using porous asphalt – or gravel with a porous membrane underneath – so that rainwater can seep through. Indeed planning rules already recognise this: homeowners are allowed to pave over front gardens so long as they use porous materials or if run-off is channeled into a lawn or flower bed – and only require planning permission if this is not the case.

It is not hard to see, however, how the issue of flooding will be used as an excuse for a general ban on homeowners turning their front gardens into driveways. London authorities have been trying to bear down on it for years: in 2015, Boris Johnson, while mayor of London, echoed Joni Mitchell’s words when he described the paving of gardens as a “sad phenomenon” and said that “too many” gardens have been lost.

The disdain for driveways is a demonstration of how little our Government – formed of ministers and policymakers who divide their time between prime city centre apartments and country houses – understand suburban life. Already, many developments have been prevented from having more than one parking place per property – in some cases none at all. When that results – inevitably – in more cars parked in surrounding streets, councils send around the yellow line-painters.

We also have public authorities intent on making life a misery for motorists – yet rather less keen on providing any kind of alternative. Around my way in East Anglia, we have numerous housing estates popping up in the middle of nowhere with no pavements, no buses, no trains. I guess their residents are supposed to stay at home all the time.

If it allows us to drive at all, the Government wants us to buy electric cars. But how are we supposed to charge them if we are not able to park up against our homes? The network of chargers in public locations is miserably inadequate, and expensive to use. Then there is crime, of course. If police cannot control thugs who break into and steal cars, it is little wonder that motorists feel happier with their car parked directly outside their front door.

That is just one more reason why “paradise” for many homeowners is less a privet hedge and cherry tree, and more a parking space away from the public highway – and why the Government should not stand in the way of people who choose to swap garden for parking.