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

[CornishTickler]

Just read an article online about the second home council tax increase and there are couples with sad faces saying it was without warning and is against their human rights! It wasn't, its been in the press and talked about by councils for over a year. It wasn't a surprise, areas with high levels of second homes knew it was coming.

I for one am glad about the tax. Our village has been destroyed by second home owners for years. A lot are badly maintained and empty for 80% of the year.

The argument that they bring extra income is also misleading. Most true second home owners who only visit a couple of times a year don't contribute much to the economy but are very vocal in interfering in local issues to the detriment of actual residents. One example (I'm not joking on this) was to oppose the planning of a local business that would benefit the community with jobs and tax revenue because of the endangered newts! luckily common sense prevailed but honestly they got very vocal and aggressive about it. It was mainly because they didn't want it to impact their second home.

Holiday makers bring revenue. Absentee second home owners do not.

Hopefully the second home tax increase will increase council tax revenue and help to support our community and vulnerable people.

@EasternStandard i would argue that St Ives has benefitted and it has done so because of the beautiful location. It has, as an area, become much wealthier than it was when it was a fishing village. Compare to say, Merthyr Tydfil, also pretty area, but nowhere near the scale of Cornwall and no tourism to speak of. Once a thriving mining community, now probably the most deprived area in the UK, with high unemployment and very low property prices.

In the absence of industry and/or infrastructure linking easily to city hubs, there aren’t many opportunities for places like these to pivot to other activities. Banning second home ownership (specifically those homes that are rented out, as many posters seem to want to see) in those areas would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Breaks out the tiniest violin

Good. More tax revenue to help fund local services.

A lot of holiday makers don’t self cater they go out and spend in the local community. They also do not poke their noses into local affairs

A lot of second home owners are rarely there and do poke their noses into local affairs.

Bad landlords are a problem, but to me that’s a problem with regulation, not the system.

Councils can’t afford to buy properties and manage and maintain them, that ship has sailed, they were the ones that sold off loads of social housing in the first place.

As for companies owning rental property, that is happening, with the likes of Blackstone and John Lewis buying up swathes of property for rent, pushing out smaller landlords. This doesn’t make property prices any more affordable though!

It is a problem that we have loads of small landlords. You see it on MN all the time. Someone who owns a few properties and does not understand their legal obligations. Or complaining they can not afford to do work to the property that is legally required.

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.

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.

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.....

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!

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

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.

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.

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

@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.

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

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.

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

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

I was hoping the Labour Government would ban Right to Buy

God, I hope so.

I hope they do something about under occupancy too.

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

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

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.