Owners face second-home ban

MIDDLE-class families dreaming of a bolthole in the country may face a ban on buying second homes.

Under a radical upheaval in planning law, they would be barred from buying a second house unless they plan to live in it full-time.

The ban would be enforced by compelling anyone buying a property to apply for planning permission before they could use it as a second home. Councils would then have the power to refuse families the right to buy if they intend to live there only at weekends.

There are a quarter of a million second home owners and hundreds of thousands more who hope to join them. Labour would have to be braced for charges of hypocrisy against ministers. Many members of the Government have more than one home.

But new laws to block second home buyers will be high on the agenda of a rural quango about to be established by Deputy Premier John Prescott and Environment Secretary Margaret Beckett, ministers have confirmed.

Housing Minister Yvette Cooper said the Rural Housing Commission will consider the 'case for Government intervention, through planning control or otherwise, on second homes'.

Mr Prescott and Mrs Beckett are among ministers who own more than one home or have several in personal use. The Deputy Premier owns an eight-bedroomed home in his Hull constituency and has a grace-and-favour flat in Admiralty Arch. {2}

He also spends many weekends at Dorneywood in Buckinghamshire, a country house for the Chancellor of the Exchequer but currently passed to the Deputy Prime Minister because Gordon Brown does not want it.

Mrs Beckett has a home in Derby and owns a flat in Westminster which she rents out. She also has a grace-andfavour Admiralty Arch flat.

Children's Minister Beverly Hughes recently paid more than £200,000 for a second home in the Lake District, one of the areas where pressure is strongest for a ban on second home buyers in order to keep prices down for locals.

The rural housing quango was a Labour election promise. But before the poll, ministers said only that it would provide 'affordable' rural housing though making new homes available in shared equity and cooperative ownership schemes.

Its highly controversial role in curbing second home ownership has only been disclosed in Commons written answers from Miss Cooper.

She was replying to LibDem Tim Farron, MP for Westmorland and Lonsdale, the constituency where Mrs Hughes bought her second home.

Mr Farron called for 'changes to planning law so that an application for change of category of use of a residential dwelling must be made before a property can be purchased for the purpose of using it as a second home'. It is not clear if the proposed curb on second homes would apply retrospectively.

Two junior ministers, Rural Affairs Minister Jim Knight and Farming Minister Ben Bradshaw, said in a Devon newspaper that the quango will 'report early next year on what further action we can take across central, regional and local government to combat this problem'.

A second home ban could run foul of human rights law in the courts. The plan was condemned by Tories yesterday. Sir Sandy Bruce-Lockhart, Tory leader of Kent County Council and chairman of the Local Government Association, said: 'The idea makes no sense at all. It is interfering with the market. That rarely works and it erodes personal liberty.'

He added: 'It is absolutely ludicrous that people buying a second home should have to seek planning permission for change of use.

'There is already discretion for local authorities to charge council tax of up to 90% on second homes.'