I think the UK needs to have some kind of Big National Conversations about housing formats and gardens, to be honest.
I live in a condominium outside the UK. We have good soundproofing, multiple elevators, big airy balconies for sitting out on and potted plants and kids' chalk/padding pools, and there are playgrounds and good parks within reach, and a big carfree plaza at the foot of the building for biking and rollerblading, and life is good.
I've had some REALLY weird responses from people in the UK when they discover I'm raising children in a flat without a garden. Almost like I've suggesting raising children inside a cage, basically. People are often very very negative about it.
I don't really see when I'd have time to tend or use a garden. My mum was a stay at home mum in a culdesac of other SAHMS, many of whom had three (or more) kids. I can see they found it very useful to be able to turn their kids out into the garden as they were around the house so much, and their gardens were used for years; the mums had loads of time to make the gardens really nice, too.
Fast forward to 2025: I, like, most mums work almost fulltime. My kids use afterschool cares and daycares, which take them to parks and playgrounds. Weekends, we're out most of the time. Weekend mornings already have to be spent catching up "things that didn't get done in the week" (letters/papers, housework that didn't get done, fixing things round the flat); if I also had to find time to deal with a sodding garden, I think I'd scream, frankly. And we'd seldom use it.
In the UK, climate change is making the UK's already wet, rainy summers even rainier and wetter; my UK friends with gardens mostly seem to describe them as mud-generation spaces or barely used at all, in the last couple of years. Few families have 4-5 kids these days, and the idea is to pack a couple of kids in tight so you can return to your career, so the years when children actually use gardens to play in are very limited. Companies are ordering people back to the office. All in all, it's hard to avoid the feeling that a lot of UK people like the idea of having a garden more than they like the reality.
Of course it's complicated, because I also do know people who genuinely love their gardens, do lots of work in them and turn them into real bowers of Eden for all the birds and butterflies, and I'm happy that they have their gardens to bring them joy.
But, perhaps there is a need for a national conversation about the need to consider a bit more variety in household styles - like, many not everyone has the time or inclination or garden and/or is likely to use one much, and perhaps it's OK to suggest some alternative living styles that some people might like? Apartment living with nice spacious balconies, tall narrow townhouses around shared courtyard gardens with maintenance fees. Leasehold reform would really help, here.
Thing is, every person who lives in an apartment is saving a whole bunch of wilderness from the concrete-spreader: not just because of the housing-land-footprint they are saving, but also because if you want to give people private gardens, you have to let developments sprawl outwards, which in turn means more car usage: more roads must be built, existing roads must be widened, more and more parking spaces will be required all over cities. The "concrete/tarmac footprint" required to provide a single family with a garden is massive, after you take all the above into account. And yet the UK is planning to build several million more homes. And it's already one of the world's most nature depleted countries.
Bearing all this in mind, I do think the UK is going to have to have a hard think about "Are we going to continue to insist that everyone with a child must live in a house with a garden, even though a lot of the time it barely gets used and the parents quite often have no time for it and resent its presence?"