HERE COMES summer, and with it the first of our annual hypocrisy epidemics. You know, it’s the one where all the ills of the countryside are blamed on second-home owners. This time the outbreak is in Dorset, where locals are in a tizz about weekenders outbidding them for properties, thereby forcing young families away, with the consequent closure of village schools.
A vicar in Purbeck says that of the 23 couples he is marrying this summer only two can afford to stay in the area. The others are going to “end up” in Poole or Bournemouth. Deary me. And who, you might wonder, are the people filling their boots with money from selling up to wicked townies? Exactly.
Any one of us has the freedom to choose a buyer for our home (friends, family, locals) and set a price (below market value, say). But don’t hold your breath. Under our immutable law of money-grabbing property transactions, we exercise our freedom to extract maximum dosh from buyers who can then be blamed for screwing future generations. Ain’t life grand?
You see it best in the countryside: a touching nostalgia for bustling little communities of quaint, happy-go-lucky sons and daughters of the soil, self-sufficient in their picture-postcard cottages with their chickens, goats and chirpy broods of children. Such rural Utopias — like the myths of Ancient Greece — are lost in time, or more likely never existed. Yet rustics — just as grasping as we townies — are developing a dependency culture. They want special treatment and subsidies to protect their “rural way of life”.
Yes, weekenders and holiday-home owners do create hot spots in the most scenic parts of the country. But they have also brought new life and money to countless places that would otherwise have gone under. Yes, villages that are deserted except at weekends can be pretty depressing. But most are almost deserted anyway, and have been for a very long time.
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You see, even country people go out to work. And given that they stopped working the land in any numbers donkey’s years ago — while retaining the right to live in the countryside — that means commuting and polluting.
Weekenders commute to their bolt holes every few weekends or so. Weeknighters commute five days a week, often covering hundreds of miles at a time. They leave their villages empty by day, arriving back at night, too late for the local shop and too tired for the pub. They are pretend peasants. They drive to work in offices and factories. They drive their kids to leisure facilities in nearby towns. They drive to shop at supermarkets. Of the 800 or so souls in a village I know well, a majority are strangers to the local pubs and shop. The place survives on visitors, particularly in summer.
Elsewhere it is weekenders and holiday-home owners who keep local economies going. Nonetheless, planners from Cornwall to Cumbria are devising ways to keep them out.
On Exmoor, the national park authority is aiming to bring in planning rules to enforce a “locals only” policy for anyone who wants to buy a new house. Curbs might also be applied to house rentals and sales, severely depressing market prices. See who screams then.
It is all being done to protect a “rural way of life”. My observations from having had various bolt holes around the country tell me this: many village locals wouldn’t know rural life if it jumped up and bit them on the bum.
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So let’s get things into perspective. The 2001 Census showed that second homes made up only 0.7 per cent of Britain’s 23 million homes. And by far the largest number of second homes is in London, where soaring property prices make it even harder for anyone to get on the property ladder.
Here the Government is frittering away an astonishing £1 billion over the next couple of years creating affordable housing for just 12,000 of London’s “key workers”. Meanwhile, a scandalous 70,000 homes — often council-owned and in shocking states of repair — stand empty and ignored.
Forget town versus country. The real trouble is that public bodies like nothing better than tinkering with new problems and ignoring the old ones.
The simple answer is not social engineering but to build more homes. On Exmoor, if you have to.