Ed Davey has finally taken a break from fooling around to launch some policies. But one of them, in particular, is not going to please a great number of Lib Dem voters. The Lib Dem manifesto is to propose giving local councils the power to put a 500 per cent council tax surcharge on second homes. Obviously, there is minimal danger of the Lib Dems actually getting into power to impose such a policy, so those nice Lib Dem voters in Richmond and Kingston who have boltholes in Salcombe, Southwold, and so on can still afford the luxury of voting for the party without actually having to face the cost of its policies.
But they might just think twice about the Lib Dems’ reason for its new policy: ‘This is about giving councils the power to ask second homeowners to pay a fair contribution towards vital public services which are currently at risk.’ In what universe is a sudden 500 per cent increase in tax ‘fair’? It is hardly as if second homeowners, in any case, place a high demand on council services. A far bigger drain on the purses of councils in seaside towns is elderly people who retire there – and then start requiring old age care.
The Lib Dems are really just jumping on a bandwagon of envy politics that was set running by Labour in Wales, where councils now have the power to impose a 300 per cent council tax surcharge on second homes. You can see how the cogs of Davey’s mind are working here: if it is ‘progressive’ to raise council tax by 300 per cent then I’ll be even more progressive by saying councils can jack it up by 500 per cent. It doesn’t seem to be working so well in Wales, mind. There, holiday lets have also been caught up in the new stamp duty levy unless they are let for at least half the year (in which case they would qualify for business rates) – which is all but impossible for many properties, especially in seasonal coastal and countryside areas.
If Davey thinks that all second homeowners are billionaires who fly in and out of their Cornish homes by helicopter he is some way off-beam. A great number of second homeowners are professional people whose working lives are spread across more than one location – such as some of his own MPs, for example. Their lives will be made a misery if the Lib Dems got into power. Davey is being equally naïve if he thinks that taxing second homeowners out of existence is going to make more than a marginal difference to the shortage and affordability of housing. Only in a handful of areas are second homes an issue. There is not a single holiday home that I know about in the village where I live in Cambridgeshire, yet that doesn’t stop a two-bedroom cottage from being worth £350,000. That is the norm over most of the countryside.
The Lib Dems can trace their ancestry back to 19th-century economic liberalism. That strand of political thinking was still alive in Nick Clegg’s day, with the Orange Book Lib Dems. It is now utterly moribund as the party has become taken over by class warriors and outright fools.
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