General Discussion
THERE will be a Housing Crisis Street Stall on Saturday, February 26, between 10.30am and 12.30pm outside the Co-op in the Strand, Dawlish.
I've just read an article on Devonlive concerning a village in east Devon and its housing situation. Someone has posted a comment at the bottom of the article which I reproduce here.
" In Devon we suffer from one of the highest number of second homes in the country and a large number, for which I cannot at the moment find statistics, of holiday lets. This has been made worse over the Covid period by the stay vacation with many tenants finding their leases terminated so that they can be let to tourists at much higher rents than could be achieved on the normal market. I would like to see major changes in the planning laws so that additional categories were added specifically for second homes, holiday homes and homes for holiday lets and that properties had to bought inane individual name and not a company. This would allow the authorities to control the number of second homes etc in an area so that we avoided locals being squeezed out and pushing up house and rental prices, which are already far too high, even higher. In addition when a property was transferred either by sale or death or gift the planning status would automatically return to owner occupation and a penal rate of capital gains tax would be levied on any profit. I appreciate that those in the market, including many MPs will not like these proposals and that is why we need everyone to realise just how serious this problem is and not let the politicians get away with doing nothing as usual. I , like many have my own house and am ok but this is for my grandchildren and their children. I see a real social problem arising if we do not find an answer to this."