There are thousands of people in Whitby for the annual regatta. The harbour is filled with funfair attractions, food stalls and thumping music. Tonight there will be a fireworks display over the pier, watched by hundreds of families.
It’s an event that will bring in millions of pounds to the North Yorkshire town from the tourists queuing up for fish and chips, pints and fun fair rides.
But you would struggle to find a local here who is happy about it.
Lily Blackman, 38, manages a nearby bakery. Despite the cash that tourists spend in her store, she is fed up with them and the holiday homes they tend to stay in.
“I’ve noticed there are a lot of empty homes near where I live not doing anything,” she says. “But on the weekend it’s like Benidorm, with parties until 5am. You can never park anywhere. These places all sleep about 12 people so they all bring four cars.
“The people who are staying don’t care about noise – last year was horrendous through summer.”
A growing anti-tourist tide is taking over some of Britain’s most beloved holiday spots, caused by the belief that the explosion of holiday lets is fuelling the housing crisis.
This year, stickers with an image of a house on fire reading “f— your second home” were spotted in the Lake District, which police described as “concerning”. Two years ago, a wall in St Agnes, Cornwall, was daubed with the words “no more second homes … our village is dying”.
In reaction, local councils have been waging a war on holiday let owners, making it harder and more costly to own a second home by bringing in measures through the back door.
Whitby’s town council voted in 2022 to ban people from buying new-build properties as second homes, similar to the decision made in St Ives, Cornwall.
Last year, Edinburgh introduced a licensing scheme for short-term lets.
And in one of the most extreme moves, the council in Gwynedd, Wales, will now force homeowners to get planning permission to turn their property into a second home or a holiday let.
In Brighton and Hove, councillors unanimously agreed to take a deeper look at a “saturation” of Airbnbs, with Green councillor Ellen McLeay claiming families had been priced out of the city centre, leaving behind “ghost neighbourhoods”.
Much like the years-long crackdown on buy-to-let, second homeowners are being chipped away at from every possible direction.
Local authorities are also using powers handed to them by central government, doubling or even tripling council tax for second homes, pushing up bills by thousands.
The war on second homes sped up after the pandemic-fuelled property boom, when investors snapped up seaside cottages and countryside boltholes to turn into lets for staycationers.
Amid outcry from locals that communities were becoming ghost towns for half the year, the Conservative government turned hostile to holiday homeowners.
Michael Gove, the then-housing secretary, despaired last year that they were turning seaside communities into hotels with an “almost permanent Airbnb setting”.
In his final Budget as chancellor, Jeremy Hunt abolished the furnished holiday letting regime, which gave perks such as relief for costs incurred kitting out the properties.
There will be no let-up under the Labour government. It is believed to be accelerating the crackdown, with plans to bring in a new mandatory national register for short-term lets.
It may also give local councils across England power to require planning permission for holiday lets, similar to but less extensive than the “Article 4 direction” used in Gwynedd.
This will stoke concerns, as in Gwynedd, that the move will hit house prices, effectively devaluing residential properties by excluding second home buyers from purchasing them because they can’t be used as holiday lets.
A Barcelona-style ban
It is part of a wider backlash against Airbnb-style lets that is taking place across the world. In New York, California and Berlin, short-term lets operate under tight restrictions.
The most extreme measure yet is taking place in Barcelona. The city’s socialist mayor Jaume Collboni announced in June that from 2028 all holiday lets would be completely banned.
Locals’ disdain for tourists erupted into furious protest, with protesters daubing “tourists go home” on walls and bins and spraying tourists with water.
Every year, the city is flooded with 32 million tourists – many of them English – and their presence was blamed for the city’s dearth of rental properties. There are some 10,000 holiday lets in Barcelona, and Collboni hopes banning them entirely will free up housing stock and cool rents, which he claims have risen by 68pc in the last 10 years.
While Britain’s local councils can’t impose a similar outright ban on Airbnbs, they are trying hard to use every weapon at their disposal.
‘Totally hollowed out’
Second homeowners justify themselves with the economic boost they bring to towns like Whitby. But critics question whether they have become superfluous.
“While second homes and short-term lets were important to our local economy, the benefits are now outweighed by their impact on local residents,” says Whitby’s new Labour MP Alison Hume. She says she is “acutely aware” of Whitby’s housing crisis, and puts the blame on homeowners flipping properties into short-term lets.
“As someone who lives in Whitby I’ve seen first-hand how smaller villages such as Robin Hood’s Bay have been totally hollowed out,” she says.
“It’s full of holiday lets around here. You have the same companies buying up all the properties and they have a total monopoly of the market,” says Lee Roberts, who has run a bed and breakfast here for six years with his wife Gwen. “For young people trying to get on the property market, it pushes the prices up.”
Others fed up with holiday homeowners claim the balance has tipped too far in the latter’s favour, and the businesses propped up by tourists are finding there are no locals with which to staff them.
“People who work in Whitby are forced to live out of town due to a lack of housing and high rents,” Hume says. “In turn, this has a hugely detrimental impact on community cohesion and fewer people of working age limits the future economic development of the town.”
Chatting to the people working in Whitby’s bars, cafes and shops bears out Hume’s words – few of them live anywhere near here. But the numbers paint an even bleaker picture – analyst Airbnbtics found there were 503 Airbnb listings in Whitby in June, with a 76pc occupancy rate, compared to the 223 properties currently for sale via Zoopla.
And if you want to rent a property long-term, you might struggle – there are currently just four available.
Zoom out and it becomes clear that Whitby is far from the only holiday hotspot in Britain rapidly hurtling towards a turning point. There were 463 Airbnb listings in St Ives in June, according to Airbnbtics.
It is not just small seaside towns where housing supply is being crunched by holiday lets. In the London borough of Tower Hamlets, official figures show one in 20 homes is not lived in full time, while 80,000 people are on a waiting list for social housing.
Across the whole city, there were 25,925 Airbnb listings in June, according to Airbnbtics. An editorial this year in London’s Evening Standard called for a curb in holiday lets to make sure housing stock “is actually available to people who live and work in the city”.
An inexhaustible supply of holiday let landlords
As the most visible platform for short-term lets, Airbnb bears the brunt of locals’ ire, something that clearly rankles with the company. Its name is often bandied about when residents complain about tourists’ antisocial behaviour as shorthand for the holiday let industry as a whole.
“Airbnb travel boosted the Whitby economy by millions of pounds last year and two-thirds of hosts say the extra income helps them afford their home,” says a spokesman for the firm.
“The root cause of housing challenges in the UK is a lack of new homes being built. Airbnb accounts for a small portion of annual visitors to Whitby and listings are typically rented for less than two days a month”.
But this logic is no longer washing with Whitby’s locals.
While they voted to ban new properties from becoming holiday lets, the referendum is not legally binding. Estate agents point out that even though new homes are being built, they are snapped up by a seemingly inexhaustible supply of holiday let landlords.
“They are making a few new estates and extending them with hundreds of houses. They’re even knocking prices down for first-time buyers,” says Maddie Hugill, an agent at Bridgfords. “I live on a newly built estate and there are loads of holiday lets on my side.”
Triple council tax threat
Even if a total Barcelona-style ban on short-term properties is unlikely, a series of onerous policy changes have certainly made owning them a more tedious and expensive investment.
The huge council tax bills that second homeowners will incur is one particularly off-putting change. By stacking taxes on second homes, local governments hope to make them prohibitively expensive. For those that can suck up the cost, the tax revenue can be funnelled into more affordable housing.
Cornwall Council wants to take the idea even further and is calling for the power to charge triple council tax, which it estimates could raise £2bn a year. Councils in Wales already have the power to increase bills by 300pc, and Gwynedd has added a 150pc surcharge for second homeowners.
Councillor Claire Holland, housing spokesman for the Local Government Association, which represents all councils in England and Wales, says these added tax premiums were intended to drive second homeowners to sell up and “bring these properties back into permanent use”.
Whether this is working is debatable.
In the Whitby branch of Holiday Cottages, Dan Savage laughs at the mention of the doubled council tax. A handful have sold up, he says, but most can afford it – and the properties coming back on the market are usually bought by other holiday let landlords.
“There are people who have 40 holiday lets, so it’s a drop in the ocean for them. It’s the smaller ones who will find it tricky.”
He adds: “If you have a holiday let that isn’t that busy it won’t be worth your while. We have a few on the market already. Unless you have a property that’s booked out for seven or eight months of the year it’s not worth it.”
In reality, the tax premium is easy to avoid. Self-catered accommodation can “flip” to pay business rates instead of council tax, provided they are available for rent 140 days a year and occupied for at least 70.
Landlords can then claim small business rates relief, effectively paying no tax at all. Councils are fully reimbursed for revenue lost to business rates, costing the Treasury £172m a year, according to real estate company Colliers.
“We have had a lot of holiday lets come on [the market] with us but they can get business relief on council tax so it doesn’t make much sense they’d be worried about it,” says Hugill of Bridgford’s estate agents. “The ones that are coming on the market are those where they…are now paying double council tax.”
Overwhelmed by red tape
Scotland has gone for a different approach, by overwhelming holiday let landlords with red tape in the hope it will force them to give up. Under regulations put in place by the SNP, anyone renting out a room on a short-term basis must pay £5,800 for a licence from their local council.
The policy did not go down well with Airbnb, which released a scathing report in May suggesting it was putting off tourists, driving up hotel prices, and “limiting economic opportunities for local families”. There has also been a growth of unlicensed lets being advertised on social media during busy times such as the Fringe.
But Angus Robertson, SNP MSP for Edinburgh Central, says it is working – and that some landlords unable to meet the required standards are selling up.
“With one in eight residences in Edinburgh estimated to be a short-term let, it is absolutely necessary to legislate to regulate the sector,” he says.
“While there is a need for this type of accommodation – especially as the population of Edinburgh doubles in August with visitors for the international festivals – the city must first be for its residents.”
The crackdown on holiday lets shows no sign of abating under Labour, with local authorities likely to be given more powers to make owning a second home less appealing.
But it’s too late for Lily Blackman and her family, who are selling up in Whitby, having had enough of 4am revelry on residential streets.
“It’s unlikely our house will go to a family. It will probably end up as another holiday home,” she says. “We need tourism, but where does it stop? It’s getting to a point where all the schools are amalgamating, the doctor’s surgery is shrinking, there’s one dentist – and all of this is happening because everyone’s moving into the outskirts.”