You may recall – or not – some while ago I mentioned the targeting of our gardens by government and developers… It was getting on for a year ago, but I remind you of what I said then:
This government planning guidance encourages developers to buy up homes with large gardens, demolish them and either build blocks of flats or use the gardens for infilling.
The BBC today carries a story that would appear to be the start of this process:
Building land for development is in demand and developers are increasingly targeting the back garden.
About 40% of new homes in some areas are being built on existing residential land, and the result is more homes crowded together with ever smaller gardens.
At the moment, no mention is made of the insidious compulsory purchase, but look what happens when people refuse:
Celia Johnson lives in a house on the outskirts of Guildford in Surrey. But it is her very large garden which has attracted the developers – more than two dozen of them.
At first she threw the letters away but now she has them all on file.
If at first, they don’t succeed, they persist:
“We would like to make you an offer for an area of your back garden,” she reads from one, “so we write back and say no, and they write back and say ‘further to our meeting, we’d like to offer you this amount’ and we say no thank you, so then you get another letter.”
The latest offer was £800,000 for the house – and the garden.
So what part of “no” do these bastards not understand?
Developers have told her that the area occupied by two sheds, a Wendy house and four fruit trees would leave room for an extra four houses.
Yes? So? It is her property and what she does with it is her business. If she says that she does not want to sell it to the developers to build more houses, then that should be the end of the matter.
“It feels like selling my soul to the devil,” says Celia Johnson, who insists she is not budging. But this has not stopped developers resorting to sneaky tactics to get their hands on her garden.
And, given that these people have the backing of the government to build, build, build are we surprised by this?
Let’s remind ourselves where this kind of bully-boy pressure comes from, shall we?
The Conservatives committed themselves to ending garden-grabbing at last year’s conference.
Quite right, too, but…
But it was a Tory government who first changed the planning rules to make it easier to build on gardens by re-designating them as brownfield instead of greenfield sites.
Yes, I know, I recall it. All politicians are venal, self-serving bastards, no matter what colour rosette they wear. They do not represent the wishes of you and I and would sell our gardens from under our noses, given half the chance. However, the Conservatives’ sins aside, the real criminal in this little episode is John Prescott:
But the real growth occurred after the then government minister John Prescott set targets for councils to prioritise building on brownfield sites, including gardens.
Including gardens. These unreconstructed Stalinists place no value on what is ours – they will use coercion for the moment; coercion of the type suffered by Celia Johnson, but when she digs her heels in, what then?
Garden grabbing is inevitable in much of the south east, says Jonathan Beach, a director at property company Savills.
Don’t you just love that phrase, garden grabbing? A voluntary sale agreed between two parties is not grabbing, it is a sale, a contract willingly entered into. Garden grabbing is a tacit acknowledgement that this is not a willing trade, that somewhere along the way, coercion has played a part.
But for Celia and others in her street, it is the attention of the developers which they find distressing.
Not just because Celia doesn’t want to sell, but because some of her neighbours do and Celia is in their way:
And I think it’s been very difficult for some people, because the ones who want to sell resent the ones who aren’t selling, and the ones who aren’t selling resent the ones who are.
Who needs compulsory purchase when you can set neighbour on neighbour?
I’m not a NIMBY, never have been, I can’t get excited about this. Sure, everybody should be allowed to do what they like with their own garden. Land Value Tax will sort all this out anyway.
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I knew you would say that… 😉
If it was to happen in our neighbourhood (unlikely, I know), I would resist absolutely. The relative seclusion is one reason for the original purchase and it is one of the reasons why property prices continue to rise here – there’s almost a waiting list. If I wanted to look out onto a block of flats, I’d have bought a house without a garden that looked out onto a block of flats. I would never respond to a developer who tried to entice me to sell and would join with my immediate neighbours in resisting any planning application that eroded our quality of life. The best part of twenty years ago we managed to fight off Bristol Rovers when they wanted to build a stadium on our doorstep – the same reasoning applied then; if I wanted to live next to a stadium, I could have bought a house in Ashton Gate. I didn’t for the very reason that living next to a football stadium would be an anathema for me. Interestingly, they, like the developers in the story, tried the old dirty tricks routine; lies and bribes.
All that said, I have no problem with contracts willingly entered into – what bothers me is that the brownfield designation and the effective removal of the council’s ability to block unsuitable applications means that coercion enters the equation, with the affected householder unable to resist – and, sooner or later, we will be hearing about compulsory purchase and that is something I remain implacably opposed to.
This is terrible. It may only seem like a little thing but it is another sign of statism.
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