ELLIE HARRISON
Anger towards second-home owners will subside if and when the system changes.
I could have written novels and learnt languages in the time I’ve spent gawping at the property website Prime Location. I’ve got a lovely house already, I just can’t help myself. One of my friends lives in the most beautiful Georgian manor house you could dream of and even she spools through Rightmove dreaming of a two-bed semi and a simpler life. We’re not alone in a culture obsessed with property.
Home ownership, and particularly second-home ownership, is a complicated and emotive subject and in many ways tells a broader story about Britain. Research from the Resolution Foundation revealed that 5.5 million people – one in 10 of the UK population – own an additional property. That concentration of wealth is unsurprisingly within older cohorts and the fortunate wealthy minority in younger ones. The flip side is a rise in renting, which now houses one-fifth of all families and one-third of those with children. There’s no doubt it creates insecurity among the have-nots. Yet those figures also show that it is less about second homes and more about buy-to-lets, bought to provide extra income or supplement pensions. This was bound to happen when there were no financial penalties for doing so and when houses earned more than we did each day. In my house, we scoff that we’ve lost count of the number of our parents’ friends who’ve
But it’s second-home owners who seem to push buttons the most. During lockdown, when people bolted for their other houses in the country to avoid the city, the press whipped up a frenzy to such a degree that some would arrive in the dead of night in the hope of not being ratted out. Gordon Ramsay took heat for his decision to base his family in one of his homes in Cornwall. And while it’s tempting to focus all our incredulity at the fairytale cost of housing in the UK, our upset at the inequality of second houses, and the dismay of Covid-lockdown on to people like Ramsay, it’s important to remember he was living in his family house and these are legitimately paid-for homes. If people can afford it, in a housing market like ours, there are very few who wouldn’t buy additional property because they think it’s unfair on everyone else. The system has been created this way over a couple of generations. It has only been in the past four years that any serious attempt has been made to look at the property divide, with reforms to tax relief, stamp duty and council tax. It’s a tiny start with much room for improvement; there is still stamp duty relief for people who buy more than seven houses in one go, for example.
Perhaps where second-home owners can help is by recognising the need to be sensitive in their adopted communities rather than bulldoze in with their vision of what a vacation should feel like. In the Black Mountains, second-home owners have blocked high-speed broadband and the upgrading of a village hall because they prefer to be ‘wifi-free’ when on holiday and they’d rather keep the shed in the village for its ‘olde worlde’ aesthetic.
Maybe we’ll see a shift following the forced experiment in how we work, which turned out well for lots of people, with many now opting for societal escape over social distancing. Some are even searching for the security of full self-sufficiency in readiness for the apocalypse. Personally I’d rather flutter through the good times and perish on the first day than live with an exoskeleton until then. But as people settle in the country as their primary home and have a stake in it every day, we’ll continue the necessary move towards a still beautiful and modern countryside.