Pitting holidaymakers against locals is no salve for our housing woes

It is that time of year again. Sunshine, bank holidays, travel disruption... and complaints about Britain’s tourist towns being “hollowed out” by second home owners and holiday lets. As Tom Mulvihill reports, the permanent residents of holiday hotspots are increasingly demanding new measures to restrict outsiders buying property that will remain empty for much or part of the year.

The unhappiness of some local people is understandable. Janet Pearson of Newlyn, Cornwall, tells The Independent: “It’s sad in the winter. When I pull my curtains at night and look out, the houses opposite are just dead.”

Michael Gove, the housing and levelling-up secretary, is proposing to give local councils the power to charge double council tax on second homes, as has been the case in Wales since 2017. Last month he said he was looking at a law to require planning permission to convert homes into holiday lets.

The Independent is more in favour of the first policy than the second, which seems like a way of further gumming up Britain’s already sclerotic and over-detailed planning system. The idea of heavier taxation on second homes, however, is sensible, and in line with the direction of policy since George Osborne as chancellor removed some of the tax advantages of owning property other than one’s primary residence.

But there is a limit to what can be achieved by punitive bans, restrictions and taxes. There are fundamental reasons why Newlyn, St Ives, Whitstable and Whitby, along with the other seaside towns featured in our report, have lost permanent residents. These reasons apply across the whole of Britain. Everywhere people want to make their homes in big cities, or in rural areas with good transport links.

To be fair to the inhabitants of these seaside towns, they generally recognise the need to strike a balance between the benefits tourism brings and its disadvantages. Without the tourists, their towns would be even more hollowed out than they are now: the choice is not between tourism and some bustling year-round economic activity that would fill every street with family homes.

The residents of popular tourist towns are fortunate compared with people who live in deindustrialised places without a tourist industry, and indeed with people in the less-favoured seaside towns that have declined from their former glory and are not fashionable enough to attract weekend-cottage buyers or high-price Airbnb renters. That good fortune nevertheless has a negative side, in that young people growing up in desirable holiday areas find themselves priced out of the market for homes – or, rather, even more priced out than young people in less desirable locations.

In that sense, then, the problems of tourist areas are just a special version of the deep problems besetting modern Britain: an unbalanced economy, dictated largely by distance from Charing Cross, and a dysfunctional housing market layered on top of that.

Our view is that the taxation of housing needs to be reformed nationally, in a way that would help to rebalance the economy, for instance by taxing the high prices in London and the South East more heavily. As for the broader idea of “levelling-up” the British economy, The Independent has been sceptical until recently that there is much else that can be done to resist the gravitational pull of London.

However, the dramatic change in working patterns since the pandemic suggests that it may be possible to spread economic activity more evenly from the big cities. People can work some or most of the time from anywhere. Perhaps broadband policy is as important as taxation policy in restoring some life to the winter streets of our tourist towns.