Londoners should be charged for paving gardens, says climate resilience report

15 comments

1. Is looking at the horrible bland boring pavement every day not enough punishment

2. Would be more reasonable to charge taxes on all non-permeable land. Car parks overwhelm the drainage system far more than Gladys’s patio.

   Set it at a penny per square metre or something, but it should be for all property not just gardens. Equally, a shed removes as much permeable land as a patio.

3. Maintaining a lawn is such a waste of time though. If rather have something that doesn’t eat up an afternoon every month to keep looking tidy.

4. Can we get incentives to unpave them?

   Had to pay just over £200 so far in removing concrete from the garden. Still got more to go but should be over half way now.

5. Instead we should allow verges and hedgerows in parks to rewild a bit. In Hastings as the council is basically bankrupt, they’ve dropped a lot of parks ‘maintenance’ like mowing. It looks so much better and is better for the environment

6. My front garden is too small to be a drive but to be honest I’ve always figured you could just put slabs down for the wheels of the car, that leaves the rest of the ground permeable.

7. Full garden? Sure, but at the front of my house I have a space behind a hedge taken up by three wheelie bins, if not paved it will be a mess of weeds and mud.

8. This is the urban equivalent of Joe the farmer who owns ten cows in Somerset has to pay carbon tax, instead of the mega farm down the street

9. This is a big problem in our neighborhood. Our neighbour ripped out his huge front and rear garden and tarnacked the whole thing. We get horrible flash flooding and surface run-off. It causes big temperature rises. It stinks in summer. It makes me want to cry honestly…then we have artificial grass, hedges being ripped out for fencing… it’s a nightmare.

10. Why does everything have to be about extracting money from people

11. The church of climatology is back with meaningless initiatives that will do exactly 2/10 of fuck all to the climate.

    More fuckery at 5.

12. Rather than another fine or charge isn’t this exactly the type of issue that should be dealt with as part of the planning process? Having sufficient drainage and permeable areas to prevent flooding is exactly the type of thing that should be considered by a planning department at the local council.

    Creating a charge for it just ends up penalising lower and middle earners whilst the wealthiest won’t notice.

    Also, if we’re talking a typical London terraced home with a tiny front ‘garden’ then this is nonsense. Obviously it’s a different story if you’re covering 10s of square metres of previously grassed area with tarmac.

13. You don’t need to pave. If you want to avoid mowing then throw stones on top of a weed defence so that water run-off can get absorbed into the underlying soil. Paving slabs prevent water from getting into the ground so there has to be a run-off for it somewhere. It’s insane everything is concrete and slab as that prevents water from going anywhere.

14. As usual, shit on the average person while doing everything possible to keep big business happy.

15. Lmao. This won’t happen. Not in a million years. May aswell fine me for not having solar panels on my south facing roof. Fuck offfffff