To be conflicted by the crackdown on 2nd homes

[chairz]

I complete understand the problems they cause & do agree with a higher levy but thenI have used holiday cottages lots of times in the past & plan to in the future.

We’ve stopped renting ours out now, and just leave them for our own use. It doesn’t seem to have stopped some awful people still complaining about it though. I think it is much worse to own a second (or third!) home and not have it used as much as possible. That's a real waste!!

Oh I've posted about this a lot. But second homes seem quite normal in other European and Scandinavian countries. So it seems to be yet another thing that British people are not going to be able to do with the money they earn and pay tax on. I hate staying in cramped hotel rooms or so-called apartments with no washing machine or proper cooker and much prefer self catering, but its breathtakingly expensive in the UK.

If a country can't even offer an incentive of affordable and decent holidays to its people in return for their hard work, (and affordable housing), then its not much of a standard of living, is it? Other countries seem to manage to be able to do both.

Florenz Holiday homes should be banned outright. Nobody should be allowed to home multiple homes when so many people can't afford to own even one.

I also take this communist view to task.

My grandparents left a Scottish island for work and marriage (marrying your relatives isn't really a great idea). That island is now full of incomers who have the funds to not work full time for a living and set up craft shops and offer homeopathic remedies, etc.. Yet you are telling me that I cannot buy a second home to holiday in and retire to in an area which I have strong family links with (still family members living there), speak the dialect of and have deep rooted connections to, because I have managed to buy a tiny one bedroom flat in the horror that is Scotland's central belt and work for a living?

Staying in one place with few jobs and career prospects is something most of us don't get the opportunity to do.

The rules on second homes in Scotland are ridiculous anyway. A German person wouldn't have to pay the extra stamp duty or council tax for a second home because it would be their first home in Scotland, while a Scottish person buying in their own country would be punished for doing so (and therefore treated better by a foreign country for buying there instead). That is ridiculous.

😂