Paul Humphreys's Weblog

In an attempt to stem the tide of people paving over their front gardens to provide car parking planning permission will be needed soon if you want to do this. The reason for doing this is once paved over or a when a hard surface replaces a garden or grass, more water runs off this surface making flooding more likely in times of heavy rain. I just wonder how the authorities will decide if permission is granted? Will it be related to the number of paved over gardens on the road already?

Comments:

I would guess it's just a ploy to dissuade people from doing it, since having to apply for planning permission will put a lot of people off. I can't see them actively rejecting too many applications - imagine the outcry from suburbia...

I just find myself wondering if it would simply be better to mandate that new paved front gardens must have adequate drainage to handle the runoff.

Posted by Lamsey on April 09, 2008 at 04:22 AM PDT #

I live in Australia, and our home is a dual-occupancy - what this means is that an existing large(ish) block of land was cut in half, and 2 homes built on it....

So because there's now twice the roof area than used to be there, the local planning authorities made us build a storm water tank under the driveway so that the water could be released slowly into the existing suburban drainage system. This tank is 3 metres long x 4 metres wide x 4 metres deep = about 30,000 litres !

I hope that you're not faced with anything similar....

Posted by Scott on April 09, 2008 at 04:04 PM PDT #