From the BBC:
A plan to raise council tax on second homes in the Yorkshire Dales could affect 3.4 million householders across the UK, it has been claimed...
According to the Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority there are about 1,500 second homes in the Dales - more than 10% of the housing stock.
It argues second homes "deny a home to a permanent resident and push up prices" and increasing tax would "help attract and retain families to live and work in the area"...
If the government agrees, there would be a charge of £8,500 a year on a Band D property...
North Yorkshire County Councillor John Blackie said: "Put simply, firms will pack up and the local young families running them will move away and find their livelihoods where work is available for their skills. It happened in 2001 when foot and mouth blighted the Upper Dales."
Inconvenient people
2 hours ago
3 comments:
Quite happy to accept that I may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer but that article makes no sense to me. It's vague and I get the impression that whoever wrote it didn't really understand what they were trying to say.
OK, so the DHOAG is representing the interests of 1500 second-home owners in the Dales and doing the portentious big scare thing ("First they came for the second-home owners in the Dales....").
I don't entirely understand the Councillor-speak by John Blackie (presumably on the same side at DHOAG), unless businesses in the Dales are exclusively carried on from second homes. Or is he suggesting that 1500 second-home owners might move out and so sink the entire Dales economy? And presumably under the status quo, if young people can't find a house to buy or rent they move out anyway?
(Based on my own experience, when we lived for almost 20 years in a part of the UK many folk would regard as pretty idyllic, the kids couldn't wait to get out and never come back. "The unwashed armpit of the effing universe", as my elder son once memorably put it. I suspect that's a near universal experience and the only people who think that kids are "driven" out of a given area are those with an axe to grind).
Ho hum.
FT, Cllr Blackie is just making it up.
Point taken about young people moving away anyway, that's the big unknown, how many people would actually move there permanently? How many will stay who otherwise would have left?
FT, that's my experience, too. Young adults don't want to live in villages/small towns, where "nothing happens". They want to live in a large town or city where's there more than one club to go to and all their mates are within reasonable travelling distance by public transport. In fact I would hazard a guess that its the lack of public transport that drives the young from the countryside more than the cost of housing. It's also part of the great homeownership myth, that young adults are wanting to buy a house or a flat and "get a foot on the housing ladder", when, even now, most are happy to rent at first. Second-home owners are doing (almost) nothing to push up rents in rural locations, and, as we know, scarcity has nothing to do with rent levels.
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