Keeping Cornwall off the ‘best places to live’ list won’t help homeless

IT was noble of the compilers of The Sunday Times’ best places to live guide to leave Cornish locations off the list in an effort to ease the Duchy’s housing crisis, which is fuelled by second homers and retirees pushing up prices.

Asked why lovely locations west of the Tamar, including Fowey, the Lizard Peninsula and the city of Truro, had been snubbed, the creators of the annual guide had an apparently credible answer.

“We felt that, given the well-publicised difficulties in the country’s property market, we didn’t think it was healthy or right to encourage more people from outside the county to think about moving there,” Helen Davies, who edits the list, tells today’s Western Morning News.

“The influx of wealthy secondhomers has hollowed out many holiday hot-spots out of season, and sent house prices spiralling out of all proportion to wages, making it impossible for many people born and bred in the county to get a foothold in the county,” she went on.

But surely precisely the same argument could be made about many other places on the list, including towns in East Devon or West Dorset, where house prices are eyewatering and incomers have flocked to buy properties?

And the fact that in previous years Cornish towns have made the list means that, by the logic of the Sunday Times team, they have already played a part in adding to the homelessness problems in the Duchy.

In truth, however, a guide like this plays just a very small part in causing the housing problems that afflict many beautiful but low-waged parts of Britain. The urge to buy a home – whether to retire as a full-time resident or use as a holiday retreat – has been a cause of concern for many in the pretty coastal and rural Westcountry for decades.

And trying to hide the attractive nature of Cornish communities from would-be house buyers is not going to make any difference.

Market forces are what drives people to want to buy homes in nice places and a surfeit of demand against a dearth of supply is what pushes up prices.

We are not going to change that by neglecting to tell people about where’s nice and where’s not. Even scrapping the whole idea of the best places to live guide – the logical end point of Helen Davies’ argument – would not make a blind bit of difference.

A combination of targeted new builds, priced for local buyers and restricted to local families, combined with tax-raising penalties on second homes, through the council tax system, is the right way to solve the growing housing crisis. And it’s a problem right across the South West and many other favoured parts of low-wage regional Britain, not just Cornwall.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with highlighting popular places to live, nor in highlighting previously neglected areas which are up and coming, which the Sunday Times list does. But welcome as it is for the list’s compilers to exercise discretion in the hope of reducing the housing crisis, it is for politicians to ensure everyone has a roof over their head.