IF you can rent your house out for a touch over 6 months of the year then you can pay business rates instead of council tax.
BUT litereally no-one will be able to achieve 6 months rental so it applies to everyone.
Most of your other posts have been reasonable but this is utter bollocks. Plenty of people will be happy to go to North Wales on holiday out of season for the right price.
OK, not Wales, but the tourist season on the islands is April to October which is 6 months and plenty of places get fully booked. We have businesses that cannot open because of staff shortages. We had a new postie that turned up last week, lasted 2 days and went home because there’s no affordable rental properties - a caravan (if you can find one) is £600+/month. The other side of this is that in the winter, lots of places simply shut down, folk sign-on and businesses expect employees not to take holidays in the summer. What has been briefly touched is that it’s not cheap to build housing here either, you’d struggle to build a 80 sq m house for £200k, which is about the same as buying an old 2-bed cottage, which will be cold and cost a fortune to heat, and still above the mortgage threshold for a couple on minimum wage. The only way to solve this is large scale investment from government to build affordable housing - but not like Help to Buy which resulted in lots of overly priced flats in rubbish locations that made property developers billions and owners left with negative equity. I don’t buy the argument about empty properties or rentals owned by non-locals - most of the income doesn’t stay local. Quite a few people do boost their incomes by doing changeovers on rentals at weekends as you can easily earn a grand a month cash-in-hand, but it doesn’t pay for things like public services, roads and infrastructure.
Maybe we could try agreeing on some things instead.
Does everyone think that the Welsh government has mismanaged Wales over the last 50 years?
Does everyone think that everyone on minimum wage in wales should be able to afford to buy a 3 bed semi-detached house close to where they work?
Yes, no for me.
Does everyone think that everyone on minimum wage in wales should be able to afford to buy a 3 bed semi-detached house close to where they work?
My answer to this is yes, yes they should. We all should. But the reality of the way we run our economy means that's just not possible. But what I would say is people in Gwynedd are in a better position than most of the country.
Most of your other posts have been reasonable but this is utter bollocks.
Believe me it's absolutely dead on. (edit: OK marginal exaggeration - it's the case more the vast majority of rentals)
I have good friends who rent out houses and they're all saying it's not possible due to the number of rental properties available - it would mean having your house rented every single day from the beginning of April until the end of September. It's just not going to happen.
But don't get me wrong, I am in favour of this - it should have been done ages ago.
Too many people were dodging paying council tax by running their house as a rental business and paying business rates which, because of the size of the 'business', were £zero!
Those that did have to pay rates paid less than the normal (100%) council tax and this money didn't even go to the county council - it went to straight to Cardiff so it didn't benefit the local area.
(and don't get me started on the compensation the WG paid out to some 'businesses' because of Drakefords lockdown policy!!)
So now that the occupancy level has been increased many people will pay council tax instead - which I'm in favour of. But if the WG hadn't made it so easy to game the system they would have been taking more money long ago.
I have good friends who rent out houses and they’re all saying it’s not possible due to the number of rental properties available – it would mean having your house rented every single day from the beginning of April until the end of September. It’s just not going to happen.
It's perfectly possible at the right price. I'm happy to rent outside that window but I'm not prepared to pay high season rates. I had a week in Friog in March with friends that felt pricy at £500. A few years ago we rented a place up from Bets-y-Coed at £300 for the week. It's now doubled in price so we looked elsewhere.
We are talking about a tourism tax here (on overnight stays), not the additional council tax for 2nd home owners. Presumably, it doesn't count if you own the property!
