Land grabbing ?
Having a second home is not always in the province of royalty or MPs someone might have inherited it .
My friend a single mother with a severely disabled child inherited her fathers little cottage in Wales ( she is Welsh ) she runs it as a holiday let . It is her income .
That’s a case specific to your experience.
Meanwhile:
- In many towns and villages, such as Coniston, Hawkshead, Dent, Chapel Stile and Grasmere, the majority of properties are now empty for most of the year.
- Across the Yorkshire Dales, much of which is in Cumbria and in my constituency, more than a quarter of the housing stock in the national park is not lived in.
- In Elterwater in Langdale, 85% of the properties are second homes.
Without a large enough permanent population, villages just die.
- The school loses numbers and then closes.
- The bus service loses passengers, so it gets cut.
- The pub loses its trade, the post office loses customers and the church loses its congregation, so they close too.
Those who are left behind are isolated and often impoverished in communities whose life has effectively come to an end.
That will be interesting.
There’s lots of empty shop premises in out High Street at present - the biggest problem is not the rents but that businesses cannot afford the business rates on them.
How can they force landlords to let empty premises if nobody is interested in renting them
I’ll be interested in reading the fine detail of this one to see how it will be implemented.
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Quite … 
I can’t see that idea, however implemented, working successfully on a large scale.
It’s not “land grabbing”. It’s called investment. In any case there are two parties involved, the vendor and the purchaser. Both parties reach an agreement for the transaction to take place. At no stage is any form of “land grab” involved.
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It’s certainly the rents where I live . They are exorbitant I can think how anyone makes a profit and they don’t . Card shops come and go . At the moment the high street has several coffees shops ( one was the bank ) and three charity stores . A WH Smith small boots and a hardware shop .
For me they could turn the empty shops into houses and they are doing it’s quaint and old and people like to live in old places .
Why do you refer to your son as your brat?
HIs cat is called Snot.
Its Todger being affectionate 
I see.
I wonder what he calls his wife! 
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Because I know the sod. Mind you, that is our prerogative, if anyone else did — that would be a different matter!
The memshab.
I am part russian and part Roman. I have Roman hands and russian feet
Why are second homes empty? Has no one heard of AirBnB?
Actually Brisbane council today announced that the rates for AirBnB houses will have a 50% loading to try to release housing stock for your average renter. whether this has the desired effect remains to be seen.
Why would you rent a house out for $500 a week when you can rent it out for $250 a night in a suitable coastal location? There is no point in having a second home in a slum is there?
bruce you have to factor in bad weather in UK which occurs for 10-11 mths of the year - you keep thinking Oz all the time you must stop it! if the weather was glorious then it would be a different situation?
I remember the days where in Wales, your holiday home wasn’t taxed to death, the Welsh just burned it down.
The solution is to build more houses.
Labour - working well in Wales.
Not.
Some developers are trying that in and around West Sussex, but choosing lower cost known flood plains. They claim to have good drainage solutions that in practice do not perform. There is one such development not too far from my location that is proving to be hugely problematic🤬
Well, don’t buy a house on the flood plain then is the answer, the insurance would be huge as well, if you can get it.
The easiest way to build more houses is to change the planning regulations in favour of handing the decisions on what is being built and how, over to the community instead of council planning departments that take ages.
I suspect though, the reason for builders not building as much now is because prices of materials have gone through the roof (pardon the pun). Some friends of ours are having their house built and over the 2 years its taken, its cost nearly double to build with 90% of those costs incurred post pandemic.
I don’t think that is relevant at all, you learn to live in the climate you have. British weather never stopped me Youth Hostelling or camping when I lived there, you just did it.
Try looking at UK people walking the Pennine way on Youtube, they walk in weather I wouldn’t even leave the house during but that is the weather they are used to. I lived in a seaside town and no matter the weather people would walk along the seafront even if it was blowing a gale.
Horses for courses