Colin D Gordon

Back in 1966, singer Tom Jones recorded his version of the country melody “The Green, Green, Grass Of  Home” . It went to No.1 and stayed there for seven weeks. Even now, it continues to be an evocative and popular  “golden oldie” with the many people (especially of that generation) who remain nostalgic about their early years, irrespective of where their careers and personal lives have taken them since. Tom Jones himself in that song effectively conveyed the sense that he would be forever  emotionally attached to his roots in  Pontypridd , South Wales. From 1974 onwards he has been based in Old Bel Air, Los Angeles, where he bought Dean Martin’s former mansion. Recently he announced that he and his wife had decided it was time to “move home, back to the UK”.  There’s a plethora of sayings and idioms (or well-worn clichés) traditionally associated with the notion of the “domestic hearth”, among them:  “Home Is Where The Heart Is”, “An Englishman’s Home Is His Castle” and (rather more philosophically): “Home Is Not Where You Live But Where They Understand You” ( Christian Morgenstern, a German author & poet)

All of this sounds initially fairly innocuous and straightforward. Where, though (for example), is Elton John’s favourite retreat, where does he feel he really “belongs” and is most  “understood”?  He reportedly possesses “homes” in Old Windsor (Berkshire), Atlanta, Nice, Holland Park (London), and Venice. Mick Jagger appears also to have five – on the Caribbean island of Mustique, in New York, Hollywood and Richmond, Surrey, plus the Chateau Fourchette near Tours, France – whereas David & Victoria Beckham have to make do with their Italian mansion in Beverley Hills and the somewhat under-used  “Beckingham Palace” ( so dubbed by the UK media) in Hertfordshire. Actor Michael Caine’s arrangements by comparison look rather more modest: He lives in Leatherhead, Surrey, owns a unit at the prestigious “Apogee” Condominium (Miami Beach, Florida) and – significantly, in this context – “ still keeps a small flat near where he grew up in south-east London”. Put together, that’s still more, though, than the range of options available to most of his compatriots – apart, perhaps, for those on the Sunday Times “1000 Rich List 2010 “(which doesn’t include Caine), .whose main dilemma is how to divide their time between their various residences in Britain and abroad.

There are an estimated 380,00 people ‘living rough’ in the UK (consisting mainly of those sleeping in hostels, homeless shelters , on someone else’s floor or in street doorways)  who do not have a permanent roof over their heads – not even the “humble dwelling”  eulogised by the 19^th Century American actor & dramatist ,John Howard Payne, as “better than nothing at all”. These are not, fortunately, the circumstances of the majority of the UK population. According to SEH (Survey Of English Housing) 2008 data, 14.7 million (70%) households in England are owner-occupiers, 3.8 million (18%) rent from the local authorities (social) and the remaining 12% (2.7 million) have private landlords. Renting is “more prevalent” in London than elsewhere in the country: 24% do so from their borough council and 20% privately. Among the latter category, the proportion of those in their twenties has doubled from 19% in 2993 to 36% now – an indication of the problems faced getting onto the first rung of the property ladder, especially in the capital.. SEH statistics also indicate that over the same period, the number of second homes in England rose by about 20% to 241,000. An article in “The Times” newspaper on 25^th February 2010 specified a slightly higher figure, (based on research by Knight Frank estate agents)- 245,384- and deduced from this that “Second Homes In Britain Are Back In Vogue”. Knight Frank themselves have concluded from their investigations that potential buyers once more feel “sufficiently confident to proceed with the purchase of a bolthole” in which to spend their weekends or summer breaks. The recession and the decline in the pound-sterling / euro exchange rate have accelerated the trend towards “staycations” in the UK as an alternative to holidays in “long-established favourites” such as France or Spain. In July, the “Observer” newspaper dedicated a complete page (accompanied by photos of the sand, beach-huts, pier and donkey at Southwold in Suffolk) to the renewal of the British love affair with “ The quaint charms of our seaside”.

Daunted by the cost of going overseas, it appears that we are “being lured back to our traditional coastal resorts”.  Visits to Spain alone “declined last year by 19% as thousands chose to forgo sun and sangria in Benidorm or Lanzarote for the delights of Littlehampton or Broadstairs”. The ONC (Office For National Statistics) has revealed that five million Britons “abandoned their foreign trips” in 2009 because of the credit crunch and opted for visits within this country instead. Although the SEH report suggests that over the past decade the number of Britons with second homes abroad has almost doubled from 115,000 to 248,000, there are also clear signs that many expatriates (temporary or long-term) are, through choice or necessity, packing their bags and returning to the UK.  Only two years ago, the “Daily Mail” was agonising (though exactly why it was so concerned was not too clear) over whether the thousand or so British expats in the French town of Eymet  (in “Dordogne-shire”) were “destroying an idyllic paradise” by setting up a cricket team, running for election to the local council and preferring to shop at  “L’Epicerie Anglaise” (The English Grocer) because it stocked Original Oxford Marmalade, Marmite, Kellogs Crunchy Nut Cornflakes and Heinz Baked Beans. Not any more. On the contrary, a year later it was lamenting that, “The dream is coming to a very public end. ‘L’Invasion Anglaise’ is under serious threat. Across Aquitaine, a silent but steady retreat is being beaten as house contents are loaded into removal lorries ahead of the long journey north. ”This “mass exodus” (as portrayed by the French media) has been confirmed by Mark Brett, the managing director of Anglo-French Removals in Ashford, Kent: “In the past, we would be full going over to France and have space on the way back. The opposite is now true”. Those on fixed incomes ( from pensions or the now extremely low interest rates offered by British banks) “have seen their spending power reduced by a third”. Some are “trapped” because they can’t sell up, but nor can they find a job to pay their way.

It’s a similar situation in Spain: The town of Torrevieja, once described as “The Costa del Yorkshire” is now – wrote journalist Patrick Collinson in the “Saturday Guardian” on July 17^th – “knee-deep in negative equity as properties that once sold for 200,000 euros (£167,000) are now fetching as little as 60,000 euros (£50,000). Martin Dell of ‘kyero.com’ ( a Spanish property website) advises that it’s an ok time to buy if you want a permanent place in a hot country, but not if you’re just looking for an investment. Which means there are bargains available, and not just on the Iberian peninsula. “PropertyIndex.com” (“the UK’s largest database of overseas property listings”) states that, despite the economic crisis, searches for homes in Spain by UK  residents were up by 26% in 2009 and for Turkey rose by 154%. France, Portugal, Italy and Greece remain popular, with Bulgaria, Malta and Cape Verde also becoming favoured locations. The second home market in the USA, however, is now being “shunned”: The average house price searched by Britons interested in living there fell from 895,170 euros to 503,473 euros.

What exactly is a  “second home”?  ‘Homemove.uk’, classify it as either “A country house for those who live in the city or a town house for those living in the countryside”. ONC research, they say, shows that 7% of adults living in the south-east have more than one property, compared to only 3% in the north-east, north-west and Midlands. Among the most sought-after areas are the coast-lines of Norfolk, Cornwall, Devon, Cumbria, Northumberland and the Isle of Wight which “appeal to large families during the school holidays”. An analysis of local authority statistics compiled by Savills Estate advisers in 2009 revealed Scarborough in the north as “the biggest riser among the second home hotspots”, up by 7.5% over the previous three years. In the City of London, a quarter of all residences are registered as second homes, 8% in Kensington & Chelsea, 6.5% in Westminster. In the opinion of Lucian Cook, Savill’s Director of Residential Research: ”There is clearly a significant difference between the working week ‘pied-a- terre’ in central London and the classic weekend retreat or holiday home, but both qualify for a second home designation. Owners in the capital need to secure a parking permit, which may well trigger them to forego the benefits of a second-home registration and re-register their property for full council tax”. Second home owners / buyers “are most likely to be professionals in their forties,such as lawyers, doctors and financial sector personnel – or those who have inherited the property from family members”.

As (until recently) in France, the influx of ‘the townies” or “metropolitans” into villages and rural neighbourhoods has pushed up prices to a level beyond the reach of most local people. Liam Bailey, Frank Knight’s Head of Residential Research, cites Cornwall – where 7.45% of all properties are second homes – as an example. In the resort of Rock, houses in the most expensive post code “change hands for an average of £1,249,000” At nearby Constantine Bay, “where there are also plenty of  Sloaney accents”, the median price – £497,406 –  is 131% above the norm for the surrounding area.  The UK’s consequent and ongoing “housing affordability problem” has since 2008 been the subject of scrutiny by the National Housing and Planning Advice Unit (NHPAU). They quote ‘independent analysts’ who forecast an additional increase of 70,000 second homes by 2015, due to a richer existing population and a change in working patterns. This, they fear, “risks creating a further undersupply of homes” for hopeful first-time buyers. It was for precisely this reason that the “Living Working Countryside Review” undertaken by Liberal Democratic MP Matthew Taylor in 2008 advocated the use of planning permission controls to constrain the second-home / holiday- let trend in rural areas. England’s villages were, he believed, in danger of becoming “exclusive enclaves of the elderly and wealthy” where services such as schools and post offices suffer because of a lack of permanent residents. Conversions should thus be allowed only  “Where there is an identifiable impact on the sustainability of the host community”.

The idea was “broadly welcomed” by the Campaign To Protect Rural England (CPRE) but dismissed by the then Conservative Opposition as “intrusive and difficult to implement”. The proposal by Yvette Cooper MP , while Labour Housing Minister, to impose quotas in the “worst-affected rural areas” plus a one-off council levy on second-home owners to cover any “negative effect” for which they could be attributed responsibility, coincided with the launch of the “Second Home Owners Club”. This was set up by a marketing communications manager, Graham Green, living in Lichfield, Staffordshire, but with a two-bedroom cottage in Devon, “ to represent the interests of the 350,000 people with second dwellings”. His members, he asserted, feared that they were becoming “social pariahs” and that the growing hostility towards them could result in them being subjected to the sort of violent attacks  previously associated with the militant Welsh group “Meibion Glyndwr”, who between 1970-1994, “firebombed 300 English-owned second homes and attempted arson against several estate agents in Wales and England”. Journalist David Harrison commented in “The Daily Telegraph” that  “Accused of sucking the life out of some of Britain’s most picturesque areas, second-home owners are now hitting back, claiming that the Government is using them as a scapegoat for the countryside’s woes”.

It would seem, however, from a news item in “The Daily Mail” on May 22^nd 2010, that the ‘townies’ sometimes needlessly stir up the animosity towards them: Newcomers to the village of Burnham Market, in Norfolk – nicknamed “Chelsea-On-Sea” – had protested that cockerels on allotments near their second-homes were causing them sleepless nights. “Furious locals” retorted that the tradition was “an intrinsic part of rural life” and one 86-year-old resident grumbled that the village had been taken over by “yuppies and 4x4s”.` The views of some of the other long-term inhabitants, however, tended to endorse Graham Green’s insistence that second-dwelling owners put £1.5 billion per year into local economies: “We spend money on the properties, use local tradesmen, buy food from local shops and eat in local restaurants. The Government sees us as an easy financial target, but if you took us out you would have a lot of ghost towns”. Clive Aslet (‘Editor-at-large’ for Country Life Magazine) , in his ‘Daily Telegraph’ article (June 7^th 2010) about the expected CGT (Capital Gains Tax) increase in the Coalition Government’s Emergency Budget, mentions a lady in the Burnham Market post Office who told him :”If it wasn’t for the visitors, we wouldn’t have jobs”. Likewise, Dean Betts of Wensum Painters: “Eighty per cent of our work is for second-home owners. We have 35 or 40 houses that we look after annually”, and Stephen Hansed of  “Herwood Landscapes” who mows several second-home paddocks: “ Stand here for half an hour and you’ll see half a dozen blokes with trailers on their way to do people’s gardens”.

 There are some ‘metropolitans’ who evidently do not yearn for even a temporary sojourn in the countryside – such as the columnist Sebastian Shakespeare, who opined in the London ‘Evening Standard’ on 28^th May 2010 that “Urban dwellers are far healthier than their generally more obese rural cousins. We work out regularly,,we eat more healthily and we have been conditioned to walk, if only because life is so expensive just getting around town”. Five days earlier, Eleanor Mills in “The Sunday Times” had been scathing about “The Toytown Countryside”, the transformation of the Cotswolds from “scruffy working farmland to film-set perfection. Now every outbuilding is a bijou dwelling. The lawns are manicured, the flowerbeds worthy of Chelsea. All of us want our plot of pastoral bliss. When we’ve got it, we renovate and perfect it to a preposterous degree”.  She gave as an example a rural friend who “Hoovers up stray bedding and hay in the stable card and collects horse poo from her fields”. For Mills, the countryside “is meant to be full of stinky smells”. She does concede, however, in her final paragraph that the money the “DFL’s” (Down From London) bring to rural economies is “ the least worst option”.

Meanwhile, on “asecondhome.co.uk”, the approach is rather more pragmatic: They advise anyone contemplating the purchase of a second home to consider first whether it will be a practical choice: If they are retired, then (perhaps) yes. If not, do they have enough time to go  (and stay) there regularly?: “Make sure that you haven’t just fallen in love with the idea of it”. Secondly, don’t buy one purely as an investment: It may drop in value. If it’s intended as a place to relax and spend “quality time with friends and family”, that makes sense as long as you can afford to take chances with fluctuations in property prices. Lastly: “Location, Location”. Does it have good transport links? “The more familiar you are with an area the better equipped you will be to settle down there”.

 The panic about a CGT rise proved to be unfounded. On 22^nd June 2010, Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne announced  that “basic rate taxpayers would remain on the old rate of 18%, but that CGT would rise to 28% for higher taxpayers”. The feared “plunge of the property market as a whole into decline”(Clive Aslet) has thus not materialised. In its subsequent assessment of the emergency budget, “The Daily Telegraph” highlighted the continuing plight of  “semi-expatriates” who live partly abroad and in the UK: When (or if) they sell their foreign home (or any overseas assets such as shares in a foreign company), they become liable for CGT in both countries.  The BBC News Business Section and the “This Is Money” website have helpfully pointed out that, though MPs are now forbidden from “flipping” second homes, this tax break is still available to anyone else in Britain who “has the means to fund relatively short-term property gains”: The “so-called time to sell rules” mean that “even if someone else is now renting your supposed main property, for tax purposes, the last three years of any period of ownership are treated as though you were still living there, and thus still qualify for tax-free status”. In the absence of this provision,  3 /10ths of the gains on the sale would have been liable to CGT. When purchasing a second property, the owner has two years to decide which of their homes is their “principal private residence”. Once that period has elapsed, “They lose the right to make a nomination and the onus falls on them to prove they are living in the second property if they want to avoid CGT”.  Confucius is reputed to have declared that “The strength of a nation derives from the integrity of the home”. Almost certainly, even in his day, a second (or third) abode is unlikely to have been an unknown concept. The final word goes to ‘Anonymous’: “Home”, he (or she) complained, “ Is where the dog hair sticks to everything but the dog”.

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