Planning

Tim Farron Excerpts

Thursday 15th July 2021 Westminster Hall

[Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD) [V]]

It is a huge privilege to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Cummins, and I thank the hon. Member for Isle of Wight (Bob Seely) for raising some massively important issues for all our constituents. I am speaking from just outside the Lake District in Westmorland, where we have always had a huge problem of excessive second home ownership and, indeed, the pressure that too many holiday lets can put on a local community. However, over the past 12 months that problem has become catastrophic.

We have been deeply concerned that Governments over the years have failed to acknowledge this problem, but surely now it is unmissable. To give an idea of the problem, over the past 12 months, estate agents I have spoken to say that up to 80% of all house sales have been into the second-home market. There are communities in my constituency where 90% of the homes are not lived in. We do not need to think too hard to work out what the consequences of even 30% of a community not being lived in all year round will be: they lose the local school because nobody is going to that school from the homes within that community, and they lose the local bus service, pub, post office and all the other facilities as well. These beautiful places can become ghost towns, but the problem has got so much worse in these last 12 months.

We have also seen the massive growth in the number of holiday lets. Here in the south lakes, we have one of the highest proportions of holiday lets anywhere in the country. That huge number has gone up by 32% in a year. As hon. Members have said, that has come about due to a variety of different sources, but in particular the Airbnb market.

Anecdotally, what does that mean? Constituents that I have spoken to in Ambleside, Kirkby Lonsdale, Grange-over-Sands and other places who had a private rented property costing maybe £600 to £700 a month find they are being kicked out, now that the evictions ban has ended, and they discover that the property is on the market for £1,000 a week on Airbnb. That is outrageous, and it is something that Government have the power to do something about through planning reforms that would actually make a difference.

What I am asking the Government to do—the hon. Member for Isle of Wight alluded to this earlier and I completely agree with him—is to change planning law. The Government should change planning law so that holiday lets and second homes are separate categories of planning use, and they should give the Lake District national park, the Yorkshire Dales national park, South Lakeland District Council and all planning authorities the power and the resource to police that, so that the leakage of those homes out of the family home market is prevented.

It seems outrageous that these beautiful places that we are so proud of, in our rural parts of the United Kingdom, can end up bleeding local talent and families and becoming places where only the wealthy can stay or visit. We wanted these radical interventions to happen years ago, but surely now these extreme circumstances mean that extreme and radical action is necessary. I add that the Government could copy what the Welsh Government have done—give local authorities the power to increase council tax on second homes to well above 100% and up to 200%, and use that revenue first to dissuade people from having second homes in certain areas, but also to invest in the schools, post offices and bus services that would otherwise close, so that we do not, by letting the market let rip, see communities like mine in Cumbria die through the lack of intervention.