Cornwall Council has announced plans to crack down on the number of second homes in its area, including charging owners more and making it more difficult to convert an existing locally owned property to one.
This is, I think, becoming an enormous issue in some parts of the country, where incomers able to pay amounts of money for a second home are pricing natives out of the housing market. It is becoming one of the fault lines, I have suggested before, in current national politics. An opposition party could exploit this by using the anger felt by locals as a way of differentiating itself from the current government, which seems relaxed on the subject. I wonder why?
Cornwall is a hotspot for second homes
Cornwall is one of the areas worst hit by this. The latest figures I can find, from 2018-19, suggest that the proportion of second homes in the south west is 27 percent – a staggering one in four homes owned by outsiders who barely live there.
This means those homes are taken off the market and largely unaffordable to locals – young families and the like, and the sort of people who work in the hospitality industry serving the needs of those second home holiday makers, who are at the same time pricing them out of affordable housing. They live in less attractive, secondary locations and commute into the “better” areas.
In the east of England, the proportion of second homes is nine percent, a bit lower than Yorkshire and Humberside but well above the north east at six percent. There is a reason for this – the east of England includes areas such as Newmarket, Bury and Cambridge which are both very expensive, in relative terms, and less attractive to second homeowners.
A third of housing in Southwold and Aldeburgh are second homes
It also includes towns such as Southwold and Aldeburgh, where this has been an issue for years and where the numbers are quite startling. In Aldeburgh the proportion five years ago was just less than a third, in Southwold slightly more. Those proportions will have grown since.
When we moved to Suffolk two years ago, we deliberately ruled out those areas with a high percentage of second home ownership, in part for that reason. I would not wish to live in an area where a proportion of the population, though forced for economic reasons to work for me, resented my presence because I was keeping their offspring from owning their own homes.
It seemed, no exaggeration, like living in an occupied country, as one of the occupiers. The campaign against second homes in Wales, in the 1980s, sparked an amount of arson. Desperate people do desperate things.
Cornwall is pushing back
The Cornish councillors are proposing a number of options. Some are mere window dressing, it seems – working towards ending homelessness, more affordable housing. They also discussed plans, at the economic growth and development overview and scrutiny committee this week, to ask the government to be allowed to charge double council tax on a second home and to require planning permission to be granted when switching a property to a second home.
This is an idea that is going to gain traction in other areas affected, such as Suffolk Coastal. This is, as I say, an open goal for opposition parties. I would go further. You throw the burden of proof for switching to a second home onto the owner, probably the landlord. He or she would have to prove it was a benefit to the local community, in terms of jobs provided against a home lost. That double taxation is not enough – the rate has to be levied higher, though not to a level that discourages holiday makers from coming here and boosting the local economy.
This is definitely not to demonise second homeowners, who as I suggest bring a degree of prosperity to areas that need it. Still, it is hard to see how this does not win on the doorstep, among voters who are unhappy about the growth of second home ownership. Meanwhile, to be deeply cynical, those second homeowners probably do not vote here…
