Why punishing second home owners in the region is misguided - Yorkshire Post Letters

For some time, there have been reports on the internet about the East Riding Council planning to introduce new council tax arrangements that will act as a deterrent to people buying a second home in this region.

If the Council hopes by this means to ensure economies in the way it manages our money, and provide more affordable homes to rent or buy, it is very misguided.

Who are these second-homers?

Typically, those who buy a second home are mature in age. They are people who have been moderately successful in life and wish to enjoy their retirement, or they may be of working age and have employment reasons for needing a second home.

Either way, they are active people who are good citizens and often prepared to get involved in the local community.

They purchase a second home knowing full well that they will pay extra taxes on the purchase price and pay two lots of council tax (even though they will only live an average of 50 per cent in any one home and use only a half of the facilities that two councils charge them for).

In other words, they start off knowing that they are making a substantial financial contribution to help a council provide extra social benefits for those that need them.

Second-homers are normally bright people who will quickly recognise when they are being taken for a ride (which they will be if ideas about making them pay double council taxes come into effect).

If these suggestions ever come to fruition, many second homers may decide that ‘enough is enough’. They will sell-up or offer their second homes for rent, often to people who can barely afford the rents and who will, of necessity, require considerable financial support and social benefits from the local council.

Very quickly, the scheme will cost the Council a fortune in subsidies. It will lose the council much of the extra cash currently provided by second-homers to help needy families.

And, sadly, this will happen and provide a smokescreen that hides a 50 year failure of successive British governments (left and right) to create the conditions to ensure the ready supply of homes at affordable rents or mortgages for people on low wages.

Town and country planning has supported NIMBY (not in my backyard) policies that have minimised the supply of building land, despite continuously growing demand, and this has been popular with existing homeowners.

House and land prices have been permitted to escalate to such an extent that most young British citizens have been sold-out and left high and dry, while illegal immigrants are put in expensive hotels for months.

British homeless persons are left to bed-down in shop doorways in our towns.

Please note that a very small proportion of people and businesses own most of the land in Britain. They always have.

And this crucial fact must be accepted. It is this over-privileged minority that should be largely funding (through a land tax) the cost of building land for low-cost houses for rent - without any right to buy.