Second Home owners doing sad faces in the press about council tax increase

I think this is another unintended consequence. Families with second homes that want to keep them for sentimental or other reasons will scrape together the money to pay the extra council tax. Money that would otherwise be spent in the local shops, pubs and restaurants etc.

That’s just what i said. I agree that empty properties should be heavily penalised. Arguing that they use the same service as every other home is nonsense though.

My argument is against all second home ownership being banned - there should be good rental properties - both long and short term, available. Banning this in locations such as Cornwall would be detrimental to the locals, not beneficial.

Classic case of yet another Tory privatisation fuck up...

Wasn’t the aim to break the big unions by creating more people with mortgages and a need to work (not strike) to pay them?

If so, it worked as planned.

I agree though. Council owned homes should never have been sold off.

My family have a second home. It’s been in the family for 100+ years and we try to rent it out when we are not there. It is very much suited to holidaying rather than long stays. I’m not complaining about paying double council tax. It does mean we have less ££ to spend when we are on holiday but I completely understand why the tax has been introduced. It is just a shame that the Welsh council that is charging it are unlikely to use it to help make more suitable housing available for locals.

Sometimes "locals" will be selling one home to buy another in the area (just like people do everywhere). If prices are being kept high because of a demand for second homes, they can't afford to sell for less than the current market value.

I've just seen a title of a news story saying "a breach of human rights"
Oh fuck the fuck off.
YOU decided to have a second home so of course you should pay council tax on said home.
Breach of human rights my arse

This comes back to different solutions for different areas (and I agree with you on the balance issue although last I looked most of those second properties did not belong to distant owners but people within the county). I also agree that Cornwall (not unique in this respect) has been poorly served at times by councils looking after local vested interests and landowners rather than the whole long term good of the population.

Ultimately no amount of shuffling around with home ownership solves Cornwall's transport and industry issues. Even if you could fill at least the family sized properties with families from the wait list (maybe a quarter of the 14k?) they would still find their DC moving away due to lack of employment and transport and struggle to pay the rent without assistance, also due to poor employment opportunities.

Compare with some parts of Europe where long term industrial strategy has kept at least some decent employment attached to every small town and within reach of most villages. I'd be more impressed by an industrial strategy to support non tourism work in areas where the balance of home ownership is out of kilter. That strategy needs to come from both local and central government - it can't be done by one in isolation.

Like what? Penalise home owners if they have spare rooms?

Then the locals need to be stopped from selling their homes to second home owners. But presumably they like the higher prices on offer.

God, I hope so.

I hope they do something about under occupancy too.

I was hoping the Labour Government would ban Right to Buy

Sorry, should have said, property prices and levels of second home ownership are high - what is the difference?

Cornwall is also a long way from London but property prices are high. What’s the difference?

Exactly. I live in a ground floor flat when I was younger. Above us was a bigger, two bedroom flat. It was owned by a middle-aged couple who lived in London most of the time but popped down for maybe a month or two in the summer. The rest of the time it just sat there doing nothing. A whole two bedroom flat while families languishing in homeless hostels.
Awful behaviour. And to think there's huge houses also owned by people who barely use them.

It is about proximity to larger cities. Merthyr is too far for a second home.

@whoopdeedoo most of these places do not have many services. The lack of children mean schools close, so children have to travel further to school. Refuse collection costs very little.
Second home owners often want the place they bought preserved in aspic, and resist changes that make life better for residents.

So just outside London…ie somewhere people want to move to with employment infrastructure etc just as I described?

Regardless of supporting the charge or not, this argument makes no sense. By definition, part time occupants of homes aren’t using services such as schools, libraries, refuse collection. The downside of that is much greater - hollowed out communities that aren’t of sufficient numbers to justify the services.

This is disingenous. Any nice area, even those with not much employment, get the second home owners moving in. If Merthyr was just outside London, it would be totally gentrified.

It’s absolutely the right thing to do , the properties utilise the same services as residents so why should the council tax bill be divided by only the permanent residents

Yes but the problem of house prices being out of reach is not exclusive to areas where there is high second home ownership, it is everywhere that people want to live ie- where there are jobs and communities and a pleasant environment. Otherwise there would be huge influxes of people moving from Cornwall and London to Merthyr!

Err get your facts right please!

Councils had no choice but to sell council properties and the Tory Govt effectively banned them from building new ones by not allowing the money raised to be reinvested in council houses.

Classic case of yet another Tory privatisation fuck up...

Councils are buying up and even building homes to rent, its cheaper than unlimited temporary accommodation costs.

For balance, Blair built bugger all council houses & Starmer wont say how many of his 1.5m mythical houses will be for social rent either.....

I honestly couldn’t give a fig that council tax will rise for these people. I have a strong aversion to second home ownership and I don’t live in an area where it’s prevalent. No one should be allowed to own more than one home at a time and houses should be prioritised for locals. Outsiders and second homers can just bog off.

You've got a point but there is also a happier medium than just banning 2nd homes and rentals etc.

ATM that balance is too far towards 2nd homes etc, current 14000 2nd homes in Cornwall, 21k families on council waiting lists.

Cornwall et al needs to build more affordable to rent properties ie Council Housing.
The county is also far more than St Ives or even Newquay....

Vast majority of these 2nd homes are way outside the price bracket of even high earning local people.