Beneficial and not so beneficial things will hide in the leaves, including fungal spores, so its fifty fifty really. Depends whether you'll enjoy looking at a border covered in dead leaves all winter! Can afford a bit of extra protection, but generally, its things like fuchsias, with their dead topgrowth still in place, that trap the leaves and its useful to leave those in place till spring. Not useful on evergreen ground cover plants though...

I do not have the time or energy to go taking leaves off the borders, I take the risk and let them lie. Do blow them off the Rock gardens though.

Yes that happens here, I have a raised bed under a huge hedge that runs along the bottom of my garden, it gets smothered in leaves from hedge and our fruit trees, I blow all the leaves to the back and leave them to rot down under the hedge, come next summer I will dig them in, gradually over the years of doing that I find it has improved the earth on my raised bed ...

Another nice thing is if you leave them you might get blackbirds digging in them for worms. We never had any blackbirds until we had leaves on the beds.

If you have a corner where you can leave a pile of leaves undisturbed, a hedgehog might find a place to hibernate.

Thank everyone for your replies. I will keep an eye on my borders to ensure plants are not rotting away under the leaves. I get a lot of blackbirds eating my fallen apples that I leave in the garden for them to feast on in the winter. Need to fill up my bird feeders as well as I enjoy watching my family of tree sparrows coming for a seed takeaway! Looks like a reasonable day for gardening after all the rain and wind we've had. Plenty of jobs to be getting on with ....

Not a good day here - strong wind and rain...

I take my weather predictions back... Didn't make it into the garden as now wet and windy and virtually dark here. The garden will have to wait.... :(

So will my shopping - its horrible out there, wet, windy, cold and gloomy, got the lights on in here....

Daft enough to go shopping without my gloves, they have now been put on standby for next time I venture out, lol...

Wouldn't need gloves here today, Lincslass, its positively balmy again, despite the wind. Weird... too hot for a coat, well, at my age anyway, lol, got my own dodgy thermostat kicking in every hour or so, so according to me, it feels like 28 degrees C every hour, followed five minutes later by the realisation its actually only about 14 deg C... I actually thought about diving in the freezer for a minute or so in Tesco, briefly. If I had, I felt sure the contents would have melted....