Vince Cable

Statistics made available from the Council show that, despite residents' fears about the disappearance of gardens to housing development, the numbers are very small.

In the last five years there has been an average of 80 per year of dwellings granted planning permission on the gardens of private houses. There are 80,000 dwellings in the Borough which puts the development in context. The numbers have fluctuated but are very similar in scale in the last two years of the present administration (185 houses approved in 2007/8 and 2006/7) to the previous Conservative administration (238 houses approved in 2003/4, 2004/5 and 2005/6) and current development takes place under the 2005 Unitary Development Plan of the last Conservative administration. The wards most affected are those on the Twickenham side where there are lower densities to start with (average of 11 per annum in Teddington and Hampton; 10 pa in Hampton Wick).

Vincent Cable MP said: "I do encounter very strong feelings amongst residents when they see their neighbourhood being changed with more houses and more cars and the disappearance of green space, albeit private. I fully support the attempts being made in Parliament to limit "garden grabbing" and to treat gardens differently from other "brownfield" sites, if it is legally possible. But these figures show that the scale of building in this Borough is very low in aggregate, is not accelerating and does not reflect any political preference by the party in power locally."