Keep off the grass - stop building on our gardens

Revolutions don't often happen in places such as Richmond but there was something approaching one last Tuesday evening.

As the Liberal Democrat council leader forced through a motion to allow the council's new local plan to be agreed out of the public gaze, late at night, the minority Conservative group staged its first ever walkout.

The cause was the Lib-Dem majority's refusal to discuss properly an issue that residents across the capital have grown to fear - garden-grabbing, where gardens are sold off and houses built on them.

It affects whole communities and is growing at an alarming rate. But it's not just gardens. Playing fields are under siege, too. It is estimated that in 2002, school playing fields were being sold off at a rate of almost one a week.

The reason is our rush to build new houses. Local authorities have been given strict house-building targets by the Government and London Mayor alike, and, as a result, people are increasingly powerless to prevent their communities being ripped up and developed.

When Richmond's Conservatives walked out of the meeting on Tuesday, it wasn't because they blame the Lib-Dem council for Government policy. They blame the council for not fighting back.

It might not look like a problem in central London but in suburbs across the capital, the march of the developers is provoking anguish and outrage.

Just last month, 2,000 people from East Sheen - a significant proportion of the community - signed a petition calling on their Lib-Dem local authority to resist high-density development instead of promoting it in their new local plan.

Ministers say they don't keep records of the number of gardens that are sold off for development but a survey of six London boroughs found that twothirds of all brownfield developments were exactly that - garden developments.

Campaigners now believe we are losing up to 30,000 gardens a year this way, the equivalent of twice the area of Hyde Park.

There are lots of reasons for this, but the most perverse one 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 all know what is driving London's new wave of development: housing - or lack of it. With spiralling house prices, increasing numbers of people find it impossible to get on the property ladder. The Government is right to address the issue - but its approach is clumsy, and it has missed the point.

Faced with a housing crisis, ministers should exhaust every sensible possibility before developing gardens and selling off playing fields. Once these lands are lost, they are gone for ever.

But government could do much more to avoid building on our precious green spaces. The US tax system, for instance, is heavily biased against developing greenfield sites and in favour of building on genuine brownfield sites. We should do the same here. Equally, if there are nearly half a million empty homes in the UK, why not devise tax incentives to fill them? Why not introduce tax relief for people who want to let rooms in their homes, to encourage better use of existing buildings?

We also need a far more strategic response. 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. The Empty Homes Agency estimated that in 2006 there were 633,328 empty homes (3.6 per cent of the total) in England with 126,416 in the North-West alone.

It doesn't have to be this way. If instead of promising millions of new homes in areas that simply cannot take them, the Government sought to build better transport links across the country, businesses would inevitably spring up elsewhere, too, rather than converge on the capital.

We have less high-speed rail infrastructure than tiny Belgium, and dramatically less than France. If we built reliable and effective links between our cities, 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. According to BT, the company saved £238 million using teleconferencing.

Instead, the Government has chosen the most destructive route - and it just doesn't add up. For instance, despite the horrors of last year's floods, and promises by ministers that they would stop building on f lood plains, the process continues unabated.

The Countryside Alliance recently discovered that in 209 local authorities, nearly 150,000 new homes are to be built in high-risk areas. Across the country, a staggering number of new houses are built in places that won't be given any kind of insurance cover because the risk of flooding is so high.

These and other inappropriate developments will come at a heavy price. But there is a potential political cost, too - and one that is growing.

A fortnight ago, Barnes residents called a public meeting to challenge the local authority's decision to sell off 5.5 acres of the much-loved Barn Elms playing fields to developers. Hundreds of people turned up, and sitting in the front row, I almost pitied the councillors as they tried to defend the indefensible. The issue was less about housing and more about raising cash, but the anger was barely contained.

In neighbourhood after neighbourhood, the issue of protecting our green spaces is similarly rising to the top of the agenda. Local and national politicians ignore it at their peril.