Short-term Holiday Lets: Planning

Tim Farron Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd May 2023 Westminster Hall

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

It is an honour to serve under your tutelage and guidance, Dame Caroline. I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Torbay (Kevin Foster) for securing the debate and leading with a very thoughtful introduction. Without wasting time, I endorse all the wise procedural questions he asked the Minister, who can take them from me as well.

We are talking about the problem of short-term lets. Representing the lakes, dales and other beautiful parts of Cumbria, I want to say clearly that we value the tourism economy. It is of massive significance, with 20 million visitors a year and 60,000 jobs in the sector. It is not just about the economy; we believe we have a duty to steward that beautiful part of the world for others to visit.

We are a national park where people can visit the Brathay outdoor education centre on Sunday, or the Outward Bound Trust centre at Ullswater. We live in a place that we want people to visit. It is a privilege to do that and to look after them. We are not denying that holiday lets are an important part of the tourism economy. There needs to be visitor accommodation, and that includes Airbnb, which is a neutral platform. The rules within which it operates are the problem.

We have to accept that, in my part of the world and that of many others in the Chamber today, there is not just a housing crisis, but a catastrophe. There are three principal causes: a lack of genuinely affordable homes being built; excessive numbers of second homes gobbling up full-time residential accommodation; and a short-term rented sector that has gobbled up the long-term private rented sector.

The register looks like an important step in tackling issues to do with standards and quality but clearly, as alluded to by the hon. Member for Torbay, it is a potential window to creating a separate category of planning use, which is necessary if we are to allow authorities such as the Lake District, the Yorkshire Dales and Westmorland and Furness local authority the opportunity to regulate and keep a high minimum of long-term properties available for local people to live in.

The pandemic saw lots of things change. One was the stamp duty holiday, introduced by the now Prime Minister when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer, which saw a massive boost in the number of second homes. Of all house sales in that period, 80% went to the second-home market in my part of the world. We saw an enormous increase of long-term rented properties collapsing principally into Airbnb, largely because the Government did not scrap section 21 evictions at the time they said they would.

The consequences are huge and human. I think of the couple with two small children in Ambleside, she a teaching assistant and he a chef. They were evicted from their flat because the landlord wanted to go to Airbnb. They had literally nowhere else to go, so the children were out of school, a teaching assistant was lost to the local primary school and a chef lost to a local hotel. They had to move 25 miles away and out of the area.

In Sedbergh, a relatively small town in the dales at the end of my constituency, 25 households were evicted at the same time—all chasing zero homes available for long-term rent. I think of a mum and her 15-year-old son, who lived their entire lives in a village just outside Grange before they were evicted. Again, there was nowhere they could remain within the community. When people are evicted, there is nowhere else to go.

I have some quick figures. There are 232 long-term rental properties available in the whole of the county of Cumbria, and there are 8,384 short-term lets, of which 75% are Airbnbs. When someone is kicked out of their home because their landlord wants to turn it into a short-term let, there is literally nowhere they can go in their community. The consequences are vast: hollowed-out communities, schools with falling rolls—many really good schools have seen 20% to 30% of their rolls disappear in two or three years—and a national park that only very wealthy and privileged people can afford to visit and stay in. It is devastating for our economy, too: 83% of hospitality and tourism businesses in Cumbria report that they have difficulty in recruiting staff. Some 63% are operating below capacity and are unable to meet demand because they cannot recruit the staff. That is for the tourism economy, which is worth £3.5 billion a year in the lakes and the dales of Cumbria. We are under-meeting the demand that exists because of a lack of staffing, as there is nowhere for people to live.

It is not just the tourism economy that is affected, but the care sector and other professions. At one stage, earlier this year, 32% of hospital beds in Morecambe bay were blocked. Why? The bottom line is that we cannot get people out of hospital because there are not enough carers. Why? Because there is nowhere for them to live.

What the Government are proposing may be locking the stable door after the horses have bolted, but I am glad that at least they are thinking of doing that. I am optimistic about a better and fairer housing market in the lakes, the dales and elsewhere in Cumbria, but it will need ambitious regulation. Part of my frustration is that this catastrophe is avoidable and obviously fixable. Short-term lets need to be a separate category of planning use so that local authorities can ensure that there are enough homes, not just in national parks but in places such as Grange, Kendal and Appleby.

The Government also need to tackle the number of second homes, although they show no intention of doing so. Why is a separate category of planning use not being considered for second homes? It is good that the Government have allowed local authorities to double the council tax on second homes, and we in Westmorland and Furness are gladly doing that. We also need to tackle the issue of new homes being affordable, which does not mean £300,000 a year. It requires giving not just national parks, but authorities outside them, the ability to say, “The only things you can build here have got to be affordable and available for local people.”

The housing catastrophe can be overturned, but with the Government planning to think about tackling only one of its three causes, those of us in Cumbria and communities like ours will remain of the view that this Government do not understand much, do not care much either, and are rather taking us all for granted.