'Anybody who thinks double tax on second homes will solve everything is in cloud cuckoo land'

The sounds of the waves mingle with small dogs yapping and the odd seagull screeching overhead.

Those who love Filey, appreciate it as a quieter, traditional, and timeless alternative to nearby Scarborough and Bridlington.

Liz Huggins has a great view of the North Sea from her holiday home of four years just across the road.

She and her husband Tony, who owns York Van Centre, come as often as they can with their two dogs, and had no idea that they were about to be hit with a punitive double council tax on second home owners.

She said: “We’re not a drain on public services at all. We support all the local shops.”

Tony added: “We almost feel like we’ve been ripped off, we went there with a budget to buy the place, paid for it.

“Then we are hardly there - we use it occasionally - and we are having to pay this when we hardly use any facilities. It seems an unfair distribution of tax.”

The Huggins are now part of a campaign, which is gearing up to fight back.

Campaigners have gained heart from the recent success of second home owners in Warwick, who will be getting a tax refund after it was found that the council “acted outside its powers” when implementing the premium for the first time last year.

“Basically they didn’t do a proper impact assessment”, says author Susan Pape, who bought her holiday flat, at Royal Crescent Court, with her husband 17 years ago for just under £130,000 after she came into a “small inheritance”.

Since April, if used as a second home, the one-bed flat in a building, which started life as a hotel in the Victorian era, incurs a doubled annual council tax bill of £3,234 - on top of the flat’s £4,800 per year service charges.

“We had it up for sale, it was valued for £165,000 and we eventually put it on Auction House.

“The price kept dropping and dropping. Eventually we were asking for £65,000, it still didn’t sell.”

Susan is now an organiser of a new Facebook group, which has swollen in numbers, as other second home owners join in an effort to overturn the hated premium. “We had a big public meeting in November. More than 100 people turned up.

“We have people joining every day. It’s going bananas.”

Joanne Draycott, a retired NHS physiotherapist, owns a freehold flat in the same building with her husband Stephen.

They currently switch between Filey and their home in Leeds, but like the town so much they want to make a permanent move, and would like to move out of the flat into a bungalow.

Joanne, who is secretary of Filey in Bloom and of the local WI, used to come to Filey as a child.

She said: “I love living in Filey and I’ve made lots of lovely friends. Ideally we’d like to sell the flat within the next couple of years but it’s not an option at the moment. A lot of the freeholds in this building are second homes and are bought by people who are retiring or have money.

“A first time buyer wanting to get a mortgage will find it difficult if not impossible because of the way a freehold is set up.

“I think it’s unfair that this has been applied as a blanket, with no consideration for the difference between freehold and leasehold.

“And this isn’t just about Filey - we’re talking about the whole of the rest of North Yorkshire.”

Warren and Debbie Mills, from Kayleigh’s Cafe, have a lot of sympathy for second homeowners, many of whom “have been here along, long, time”, and come all year round.

“When the footfall goes down, they are very important,” said Debbie, who’s sceptical about what the money raised will actually go on.

“If they could say where the money is going, give you the figures and the paperwork and the receipts, you could say you have spent it on social housing. But are they?”

Veteran Filey town councillor Mike Cockerill said the town council hadn’t been consulted over the introduction of the tax and he doesn’t think North Yorkshire Council had gone “into sufficient detail to tell whether it’s a good or bad thing.”

He said the problem of empty homes stretched back decades and he remembered when he first stood for the town council in 1983 delivering leaflets around Filey and being “amazed how many homes were not in permanent occupancy.”

The councillor, who has lived in Filey all his life, says the double tax on its own can’t solve the problem of the lack of homes for young Filey families.

He said: “To me anybody who thinks the idea of a double tax for second homes will solve everything is in cloud cuckoo land.

“If some land could be identified and the income from the extra tax could be spent on that to develop homes suitable for young Filey families it would be a step in the right direction.

“But I can’t see that happening because we have pretty much run out suitable land to develop in Filey.”